A team I had the privilege of leading at SIGAR has finished a comprehensive lessons learned report on the U.S. effort to stabilize contested Afghan districts from 2002-2017.

Our analysis reveals the U.S. government greatly overestimated its ability to build and reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its stabilization strategy. We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians. As a result, by the time all prioritized districts had transitioned from coalition to Afghan control in 2014, the services and protection provided by Afghan forces and civil servants often could not compete with a resurgent Taliban as it filled the void in newly vacated territory.

Below is a more detailed version of my latest piece for the New York Times, available here.

While most of the focus in the last three years of intermittent talks among Taliban, US and Afghan officials has revolved around simply getting the parties to the table—who will fulfill which preconditions, what confidence-building measures will demonstrate the parties’ sincerity and capability of delivering, etc.—the long-term prospects for peace are rarely discussed in detail. Given their immediacy, it is tempting to get caught up in issues such as whether and when the Taliban will renounce violence or accept the Afghan constitution (as frequently demanded by Kabul) and whether Kabul will refuse to permit foreign forces and advisors to remain in Afghanistan (as demanded by the Taliban). Yet even if Kabul and the Taliban find themselves sitting at the same table down the road (as America’s involvement is merely the opening act), how would they navigate the thorniest issues, what role would US support for Kabul play in the negotiations, and what might a final settlement look like?

With the Taliban gradually softening its vision of itself in a future Afghanistan, it is difficult to know just how far the group would come to secure a prominent seat at the table. In contrast, women and minority groups (particularly ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras) have not moved an inch in their public proclamations as to what they would settle for; with memories of persecution in the 1990s, they seem to have a much greater stomach for continued war than the Pashtuns who have borne the brunt of the war’s last decade. Instead, these groups with a history of marginalization have spent their resources insisting that the Taliban must not be trusted, no matter the cost.

To be sure, at least until the drawdown is complete, the Taliban has little incentive to negotiate in any meaningful way, despite what they may say in Doha. Already divided internally over negotiating at all, the group will wait to see what exactly Afghan forces will be capable of with only a small residual force of western advisors beginning in 2015 before moving beyond confidence-building measures. If the cities are deemed strategically vulnerable, serious negotiations will be highly unlikely, but if Afghan forces are getting enough Western financial support to hold down the population centers as well as regularly mount assaults on insurgent strongholds, the Taliban may feel increasingly compelled to settle. Still, neither those Talibs favoring meaningful negotiation nor those who oppose it will be able to persuade the other until there is evidence of Afghan forces’ apparent success or failure during the 2015 fighting season, if not later.

If the parties do make it to an internationally-mediated negotiating table, however, then based on the Taliban’s history of governance, its public statements since the 2001 US invasion, and the current structure and make-up of the Afghan government, it is likely that the contours of a possible settlement would pivot on several key Taliban grievances, most of which it feels would be remedied by implementing sharia law and giving the Taliban far more influence across Afghan society, starting with rewriting the Afghan constitution. On principle, the international community and anyone remotely interested in protecting minorities and women will not indulge talk of rewriting the constitution, but the Taliban would probably settle for a number of modifications that make the country more Islamic.

Precisely what that means in a country that is already culturally and legally anchored in Islam is unclear, but it most likely means extending certain cultural norms of rural Pashtun society (regarding education, religion and the role of women) across the country. For instance, female education beyond middle school in the rural east and south is already extremely rare, even in the absence of the Taliban. (In contrast, the Taliban’s history of draconian punishment is one tenet that few in Afghanistan value or miss because those measures had nothing to do with Afghan culture to begin with.) Yet Kabul would never agree to enforce gender or education norms like those across the country, which is exactly why a more likely settlement would revolve around a different kind of modification to the constitution: decentralization of the Afghan government.

Kabul has one of the most centralized governments in the world; there are no institutions at the provincial or district level, for instance, that are permitted to create and enforce their own laws—a longstanding grievance among most Afghans who frequently decry Kabul’s insensitive intrusions into local affairs. In effect, decentralizing would allow the Taliban (and all Afghans, for that matter) to get more of what it wants in the areas where it has more influence, and less of it in areas in which it has little influence, obviating the need to force values on anyone who does not already share them.

Still, many Afghans and outside observers fear that decentralization would essentially concede large slices of the country to the Taliban—more than enough, for instance, to provide safe haven to al Qaeda or slice the noses off of runaway brides, should the Taliban so choose. As a result, any decentralization would be unlikely to grant the Taliban carte blanche but instead permit it (working within the mechanisms and institutions of the Afghan government) to make certain cultural norms official that are already widespread in their respective areas of influence. Relatively speaking, decentralization would also appeal to Kabul because the Taliban is expected to control (or already does control) much of the east and south after 2014 anyway, making such a concession considerably less painful and more akin to recognizing reality.

In theory, then, the Taliban could have local state-sanctioned sharia courts that adjudicate civil law disputes; education norms could be drafted and implemented on a province-by-province basis; and district and provincial governors could be chosen locally, though Kabul would be hard-pressed to forfeit its authority to appoint provincial leadership. To be sure, any such modifications would face enormous logistical and political firestorms—specifically, would traditional and locally based shuras decide on these norms and appoint provincial/district leaders, or would they be voted on by citizens?—but the question is whether those tempests are harder for Afghans to weather than a civil war.

Alternatively, if negotiations do not go down the path of decentralization, then depending how vulnerable the central government feels to Taliban encroachment, the parties might consider a temporary unity government to build trust in governing together, or a more permanent power sharing arrangement that gives the Taliban and other coalitions veto power over the most important decisions in Kabul. Another variant would allocate a certain number of parliament seats or ministries to the Taliban. (In that vein, through a Norwegian intermediary President Karzai reportedly already offered the Taliban the Ministry of Justice and the position of Chief Justice on the Afghan Supreme Court.) If the Taliban were to accept an allocation of ministries, though, it is hard to imagine such a deal without either Defense or Interior included—frightening as such a prospect would be to non-Pashtuns.

Furthermore, power sharing has a tendency to paralyze governments that employ them because, after all, recently warring parties rarely agree on much. Nor would it be the first attempt in Afghanistan. The 1992 Peshawar Accord was a power sharing agreement cobbling together the mujahideen commanders that had recently expelled the Soviet Union’s 40th Army Division and forced the resignation of Afghan President Najibullah. The deal collapsed almost immediately when one of the intended signatories, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (currently the commander of insurgent group Hezb-e Islami and key player to any successful deal today), refused to play second fiddle and tried to seize Kabul, triggering the civil war. There were also a number of other unsuccessful attempts in the following years, but only the Taliban’s eventual monopoly of force was able to quell the violence. Nonetheless, any power vacuum in 2015 will not be as acute as it was in the early 1990s, and it must be said that in some instances power sharing can create enough trust and confidence in governing together that cooperation finally becomes possible, as has been the case in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

The anticipated residual footprint of roughly 15,000 western forces after 2014 creates additional obstacles to any deal, and it also presents a bit of a paradox. The very same western advisors whose presence compel the Taliban to consider negotiations with Kabul may also make it impossible for the Taliban to negotiate in earnest without losing face. Having demanded the withdrawal of western forces as a precondition to negotiations with Kabul, the Taliban may find that it can only secure such an outcome as the result of a deal, much as Kabul is unlikely to secure a renunciation of violence from the Taliban except as a tenet to an eventual agreement. Unsurprisingly, in this delicate balance, many of the cards each party might play could just as easily derail the process as they could open it up for compromise.

Inevitably, any settlement the Taliban might want to accept would have to safeguard Pakistani interests as well, and even if the Taliban grows weary of violent conflict, Pakistan will be unlikely to grow weary of funding it. It has become conventional wisdom that the Pakistani military prefers an unstable Afghanistan (even at the cost of destabilizing Pakistan) to one where India is able to use Afghanistan to encircle and threaten Pakistan from the outside. So even if the Taliban were in a position to diverge from Pakistan, their handlers in the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) could easily spoil any deal by shifting its resources to yet another Islamist faction to continue the war against Kabul. In that case, even after the rosiest of political settlements, Afghanistan’s security would be as marred as Iraq’s is today.

Still, Islamabad might support a power sharing agreement if it gave the Taliban enough power as to preclude a reasonable amount of Indian influence in Kabul, particularly with Afghan security forces. Yet because reaching that threshold would give the Taliban enough influence to resemble Kabul’s surrender in many corners, the kind of power sharing that Kabul could tolerate would be unlikely to satisfy Pakistan, even if it satisfies the Taliban. Ironically, even if the Taliban settles for control over some of the ‘softer’ ministries like education and justice, the ISI cares far more about the ‘harder’ ministries like interior and defense, making consensus over power sharing even more elusive. Instead, more common ground is likely to be found with decentralization and the subsequent overt Taliban influence in much of southern and eastern Afghanistan. Granted, even then it remains unclear if such a Pashtun buffer would provide sufficient “strategic depth” to reassure Pakistan about Indian encirclement, especially if a Tajik is still in charge of national military strategy. It certainly wasn’t sufficient in the mid nineties, when the Taliban controlled most of the south and east and Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Massoud was Defense Minister.

That said, decentralization is still the basis for the most probable and equitable political settlement, particularly because it would benefit the widest cross-section of Afghans—a key ingredient in preventing the fragmentation of the Afghan army and rearmament of non-Pashtun militias who are liable to interpret power sharing as a zero-sum appeasement of the Taliban.

Yet if the Taliban senses that decentralization is the best deal it can hope to secure at the negotiating table, its leaders are unlikely to forsake violence if they can still gain all the benefits of decentralization without making any concessions. In other words, if they feel confident that Kabul will avoid their heartland anyway due to the central government’s pending impotence, then the Taliban would gladly settle for unofficial decentralization caused by a void of official security and governance. That way, the Taliban could continue fighting to get more than negotiations would likely offer without closing the door on negotiations if its gamble fails.

For this reason, instrumental to driving the Taliban to the negotiating table is convincing the movement that it cannot count on unofficial decentralization simply by avoiding serious talks. Undoubtedly, that is a high bar for the army and police force, even higher than the ‘Afghan good enough’ standard of merely maintaining control over population centers in the absence of western forces. Yet keeping the Taliban off balance in its own backyard—with Army clearing operations, more Afghan Local Police and other similar measures in areas under Taliban control—is crucial, as difficult a task as it may be. The Taliban would need to see that Afghan forces can patrol and fight independently, and equally important, the Taliban must not be tempted to think that any success Afghan forces have in 2015 would disappear in subsequent years.

If western support after 2014 is insufficient to permit Afghan forces to make such strides, the only way to lure the Taliban to the table would be for Kabul to expand the menu and give the impression that a power sharing arrangement particularly favorable to the Taliban would be possible—specifically, one that offers the Taliban the Ministry of Defense or Interior. In the end, it may turn out that the Taliban’s many enemies would prefer endless war to taking such a risk; in fairness, the Taliban might not settle for significant influence in the government and opt instead to go for the jugular, as Hekmatyar did in 1992.

Inevitably, Afghanistan will face tremendous change in the near future, most fear for the worse, and the Americans will only be in a position to help, not rescue, their Afghan allies. A peaceful solution, if one is to be found, remains years away. Yet with a mostly free and fair presidential election in 2014 and a modicum of success among Afghan security forces after the drawdown is complete, it may be tempting for the parties to put their full weight behind the effort. Unfortunately, a great many stars must align to make that happen.

In early 1989, Dr. Mohammed Najibullah, the embattled communist president of Afghanistan, faced a choice. As the last of the Soviet forces supporting him had withdrawn, he knew the momentum of the U.S.-funded mujahideen bent on his overthrow would be hard to stave off. Moscow was offering only money, a handful of advisors and limited air support as a consolation to what seemed like impending doom. Even with a strong army, Najibullah knew success would depend on his ability to secure mujahideen territory outside of Afghan cities, and that would require the help of militias.

While centuries of fickle alliances and treacherous terrain have made unaccountable Afghan warlords and the fighters they command a double-edged sword, it was a risk Najibullah felt compelled to take. By the time Soviet financing finally dried up in early 1992, Najibullah had amassed more than 170,000 irregular fighters (not including those whose neutrality he leased), and as he knew they would, his newly poor militias switched sides in droves, signaling the beginning of the end.

President Karzai (and his 2014 successor) will soon face a similar dilemma, though in all likelihood, what surely didn’t feel like much of a choice to Najibullah will feel equally constricting to Kabul in the coming years. The numbers and dynamics on the ground speak for themselves.

Assuming Washington is able to secure a Status of Forces Agreement with Kabul, U.S. forces will draw down to an expected 5,000-10,000 advisors and counterterrorism professionals by the end of 2014. In the following three years, Afghan forces (police, military and border security) will collectively contract from 352,000 to 230,000 due to budget constraints and a lack of international donors.

Currently, Afghan forces have significant difficulty holding territory on their own even when NATO forces secure it for them, to say nothing of their ability to capture new territory independently. Worse still, Afghans are known for abandoning their outposts shortly after U.S. forces leave them in Afghan hands; in one catastrophic 2011 instance, the Afghan army abandoned a fully-stocked, well-fortified, battalion-sized base to the Taliban in Kunar.

Given the terrain and vulnerability to NATO and Afghan forces, it is unsurprising that before his death Osama bin Laden even suggested Kunar and Nuristan as havens for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters seeking refuge from the drones over northwest Pakistan, and many took his advice. Today, nearly all of Kunar and Nuristan have been conceded to the Taliban, and the withdrawal of the final U.S. brigade in the region will surely widen the security vacuum. Elsewhere, even when Afghan forces hold their ground, absent NATO forces goading and supporting them, they rarely leave or venture far from the confines of their bases to engage the Taliban.

In due time, when the contraction of Afghan forces requires an even more acute realignment to protect only the country’s most important population centers and infrastructure (government buildings, roads, etc.), there won’t even be the semblance of a military presence in the countryside, nor targets to draw Taliban attention from the prized cities and district centers.

After 2014, CIA and U.S. special operations forces will try to compensate for these shortcomings by drastically increasing the number of drone strikes in Afghanistan (which, by December 6, had exceeded 447 in 2012 alone). Predictably, while a counter-terrorism strategy might be sufficient to prevent locally planned attacks against the American homeland, it will not be sufficient to protect Afghans who are sure to suffer an increase in domestic terrorism attacks like those seen throughout Iraq after the U.S. drawdown there.

Unpleasant as it is, the same geopolitical necessity that drove Najibullah to use Soviet money to play militias and mujahideen against each other will lead Afghanistan’s next president to do the same with American support. Karzai’s successor will not be as ruthless as Najibullah was, yet neither will he be under any illusions; he will not blindly hope for “victory” in the absence of more than 100,000 proficient soldiers and marines when their presence couldn’t even bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, much less to its knees. As a result, to keep militants from trying to contest populated areas, he will feel compelled to knowingly instigate conflict in rural areas to keep fighting out of the dozens of small and large cities across the country. The countless anti-Taliban militias, mostly dormant since the U.S. invasion, are sure to rise again, though absent coherent organization and effectiveness. Kabul will seek to harness their efforts in order to keep the various Islamist elements busy in the countryside — away from the people and institutions that matter most to a threatened regime — leaving rural Afghans to bear witness to the coming war.

The problem, however, is the resistance such a plan would inevitably face, both by Afghans who remember how Najibullah’s militias laid waste to Afghanistan, and to international donors who have become sensitive to the country’s history of irregular forces eclipsing conventional ones. As a result, the new militia effort will likely have two defining characteristics: it will be strictly tethered to the concept of self-defense at the local level to promote the impression that every militia is small, independent and lacking grander ambitions; and it will try (but surely fail) to bypass the most well known warlords in its selection of candidates to minimize the threat of nationwide civil war or insurrection.

For perspective, the bulk of Najibullah’s militia forces were generally designated to a certain region or cluster of provinces, and they were known for preying on the population throughout their area of operation. In contrast, through a mechanism designed for locals to protect their own communities, a smaller number of his militia forces were anchored to the villages the fighters actually lived in, with the senior-most commanders in charge of a handful of villages at the most. These latter forces, like the modern day Afghan Local Police (ALP), were relatively less prone to exploiting their communities and, in fact, had a decent track record of defending them by Afghan standards. But there weren’t nearly enough of them to make a difference, just as there aren’t nearly enough ALP to make a difference today. Given the ALP’s modest success and relative lack of controversy, Kabul will seek to reproduce it.

Yet because it takes anywhere from six months to a year to stand up an ALP unit — and the program’s funding is closely monitored out of the Ministry of Interior — Kabul will resort to creating similarly small local defense forces on the cheap and with less red tape through the National Directorate of Security (NDS). At the president’s guidance, NDS will do its very best to avoid empowering the most potent warlords and to focus on installing lower-level commanders, thus keeping civil war predictions at bay.

Unfortunately, the very men who whose role in these local militias would raise red flags in Kabul or Washington are ultimately the only men who can sign off on such local forces. In the enormous web of Afghan patronage networks, most potential leaders of a local force in the east or south are beholden to (or at least subject to the strong influence of) a mujahideen commander or warlord. So try as Kabul might to bypass the more corrupted and corrupting influences of the informal Afghan security sector, they will fail, and exceptions will be made often and begrudgingly.

More problematic, when one force isn’t working well, or the Taliban moves to a different area, new forces will be stood up and rivalries will inevitably be born to compete over government resources, prestige and access to vulnerable populations. Internecine conflicts between the various village forces will become abundant, even while many also successfully fight the Taliban, and local chaos will become a byproduct of self-defense. Yet at the strategic level, pockets of civil war in the east and south will be regarded as a necessary cost of protecting the built up areas from Taliban infiltration. Kabul is well aware of this trade-off and surely recognizes that rural Afghans in the Pashtun heartland will be offered as a sacrifice for the country as a whole, with or without their consent.

Perhaps as a test-run, this strategy was clearly visible over the summer in Ghazni’s Andar District, where a number of unaccountable Karzai loyalists and kingmakers (including the Chief of NDS) co-opted and armed an anti-Taliban resistance made up of Hezb-e Islami fighters. To be sure, their initial success has been remarkable, and Kabul has struggled to conceal its glee at having found a militia-in-a-box masquerading (for American eyes) as an organic resistance movement, taking the fight to the Taliban and capturing terrain the government hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.

It is painfully ironic, however, that the same resistance fighters expelling the Taliban for their predations today were expelled by the Taliban nearly a decade ago for their own abuse of the population. Unsurprisingly, post-“liberation” honeymoons are getting shorter and shorter in Afghanistan; while the resistance fighters have ousted the Taliban in places, residents claim they have brought more problems than they have alleviated. Where once Andar was under complete control of the Taliban, now it is hotly contested, and marauding gangs of armed youth are terrorizing locals because no one has the preponderance of force to stop them. Worse still, even the anti-Taliban resistance itself has fractured and regularly clashes internally, even though one of the three sub-groups is funded by NDS and another by the Ministry of Interior. If this is what Kabul touts as success, sad as it is, then it is sure to be reproduced, likely on a massive scale.

As was the case with Najibullah, even with implausible deniability, the financial and political costs for Kabul to instigate conflict between and among sponsored militias and the Taliban are negligible provided that they stay out of built up areas. While undoubtedly a dangerous short-term solution to a lasting problem, Kabul will be forced to triage, and national security will come at the expense of local security.

Apparently well ahead of the curve, Herati strongman Ismael Khan recently announced that he was mobilizing his militia in anticipation of a 2014 security vacuum, provoking widespread rebuke from Afghan officials. Yet they should not be surprised if other warlords follow suit, nor if their own president quietly encourages Khan to carry on, well aware that the contraction of Afghan troops will deplete forces in Khan’s relatively safe corner of western Afghanistan long before they depart the less secure district centers in the south and east.

Despite the implicit and uncomfortable reliance on local fighters, with Kabul repositioning its forces to protect the population, the Afghan government will — ironically — attempt to keep the militias themselves out of cities as well, depriving warlords both big and small any opportunity to challenge government forces directly wherever territory overlaps. Anticipating such a tightrope and addressing claims that he wants to plunge the country into a civil war, Khan even framed his force’s mobilization not as in opposition to the government but rather as a supplement to Afghan forces.

Najibullah no doubt would be thrilled to hear it, checkbook in hand. And despite widespread reluctance to admit it throughout the capital, Karzai’s successor will quietly embrace such developments as hated necessities, though with a stronger emphasis on local security measures. After all, while the survival of the government will likely cost rural Afghans dearly, in Kabul’s eyes, Afghanistan faces either a possibly limited civil war in the boonies, or a nearly guaranteed civil war everywhere.

]]>https://justwars.org/2013/01/24/the-coming-rise-of-afghan-militias/feed/0DavidA member of the Afghan Security Group, a local militia force, carries a weapon at OP Mustang in Afghanistan. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters)Interviews on Voice of Americahttps://justwars.org/2012/10/21/interviews-on-voice-of-america/
https://justwars.org/2012/10/21/interviews-on-voice-of-america/#respondSun, 21 Oct 2012 20:50:47 +0000http://justwars.org/?p=942On 15 Oct 2012 I was interviewed by both the Dari and Pashto channels of the Voice of America – Afghanistan. Below are the videos of each interview, and further below are the approximate English transcripts.

DARI TRANSCRIPT

VOA: Given Afghanistan’s achievements and the security challenges facing the country, including green-on-blue attacks, can the transfer of security responsibility to Afghans succeed?

DHY: It can certainly transfer, yes, but its success is a different question. It’s important to remember that only 15% of these attacks are the result of infiltration–that is, the Taliban sends one of its fighters undercover into the Afghan National Security Forces to attack NATO forces at a later time. Another 15% are the result of coercion of existing ANSF members–either by blackmailing them and threatening their families if they do not attack NATO forces, or by bribing them with money. The remaining 70% are due to cultural clashes. The reason for those cultural clashes are frequently rooted in the way of training. American forces tend to train Afghans by using a great deal of shouting, profanity and even humiliation because that’s how most armies are trained, including America’s. In fact, Afghans train the same way, but it completely changes the dynamic when the trainer is an outsider and not from the same culture or religion as the trainee.

VOA: Many Afghans fear the return of a civil war if the international community doesn’t stay the course after 2014. Do you agree with that?

DHY: I do believe there will be a limited civil war in remote pockets of the east and south. As Coalition Forces draw down, so too will Afghan forces, from about 350,000 to 230,000 mostly due to budget constraints. And when that happens, the remaining troops will focus their efforts on cities and other populated areas, leaving much of the rural areas of the east and south unprotected. As a result, I believe Kabul will deliberately instigate civil war in those unprotected areas by employing militias to keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda busy enough in the remote areas to ensure they stay out of populated areas.

VOA: The US is increasingly focusing on a political process where the Taliban can be reconciled to help stabilize Afghanistan. Is this approach from a position of weakness going to work?

DHY: It may be from a position of relative weakness, but I believe it can and should work. But that’s hardly the only obstacle. The peace process remains the best path for ensuring Afghan stability after ISAF withdraws. But the US government recently announced that it would not be pursuing a negotiated settlement before 2014 because it realized how unlikely success has become. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to come after 2014 because the primary leverage that might compel the Taliban to negotiate is the presence of international forces. Once they leave, there is little motivation for the Taliban to negotiate because they have refused to negotiate with the Kabul government. On the other hand, the Taliban is extremely divided on whether to negotiate with US forces because most of the mid-level commanders are furious that their leaders appeared to be abandoning them to cut a deal. In the end, however, the US appears to want a deal more than the Taliban, and that means they are more likely to offer far more concessions to secure a deal.

VOA: Given the elections in the US and the economic crisis gripping most NATO countries, how do you assess the prospects of international military involvement in Afghanistan after 2014?

DHY: No matter what happens, the residual force remaining after 2014 is expected to number between 10-20,000, mostly trainers and special operations forces. the number could be significantly higher or lower. Preliminary negotiations recently began to establish the Status of Forces Agreement, which will determine the exact number and nature of the forces remaining. The long-term SOFA in Iraq failed over the issue of accountability. Americans wanted any Americans who committed crimes in Iraq to be tried by American courts, while Iraqis wanted them to be handed over to Iraqi courts. I expect a similar fallout to disrupt negotiations in Kabul with unknown results. But the US is committed to security forces beyond 2014. Their exact make-up is simply unknown.

PASHTO TRANSCRIPT

VOA: Foreign troops are expected to withdraw from Afghanistan after 2014. What would you suggest to US and NATO about a continuing contribution to Afghanistan beyond that?

DHY: Well, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Najibullah’s regime collapsed with it because the money stopped flowing. If the money ever stops flowing to Afghanistan’s security forces in the next decade, they will inevitably collapse. As a result, even if US forces leave, our support for ANSF must remain, or everything we fought for will be in vain.

VOA: Peace efforts are still happening with the US and Afghan governments. Is there any hope for a positive result of these efforts before 2014?

DHY: I’m afraid not. The US government recently announced that their negotiation effort with the Taliban had essentially failed, and that any effort in the future would have to take place between the Afghan government and the Taliban directly. Unfortunately, the Taliban refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the current Afghan government, so at this rate any peace agreement is highly unlikely any time soon.

VOA: Pakistan says they can facilitate negotiation between Afghan and Taliban leaders. Do you see Pakistan as a reliable partner in this counterinsurgency?

DHY: Pakistan is certainly a reliable partner in fighting the counterinsurgency in Pakistan, but in Afghanistan I’m afraid I haven’t seen any evidence that Pakistan is a full-faith partner to the American counterinsurgency effort there simply because it is not in their interest, in my perspective. Certain segments within the Pakistani government–not the entire government, but certain powerful elements that are able to influence the Taliban–don’t see fit to contribute to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Pakistan certainly could contribute to the counterinsurgency by urging the Taliban in Pakistan to come to the table, and they’ve been claiming a desire to arrange for visas for the peace office in Qatar and shuttling between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it can go beyond verbally encouraging it.

VOA: Afghanistan’s government frequently says that this war is not being waged in Afghan cities and villages but rather outside of the country. Do you think the US and NATO recognize these statements?

DHY: It is fashionable to blame Pakistan for most of the things going wrong in Afghanistan. As I said, there are certain elements of the Pakistani government that support the Taliban, and for that reason it is tempting to blame the insurgency solely on Pakistan. However, the foreign fighters that cross the border in Afghanistan have to link up with locals. They have to have local help to identify who the leaders are that are currently supporting the government, and who are opposing the Taliban. Without these local facilitators, foreign Pakistanis can do nothing in Afghanistan except cause terrorism in rare instances around the country. They need locals to facilitate it, and this war, while being funded in my eyes (and evidence has shown) in Pakistan, this insurgency is being implemented and fought by Afghans.

]]>https://justwars.org/2012/10/21/interviews-on-voice-of-america/feed/0DavidThe Future of Militias in Afghanistanhttps://justwars.org/2012/10/10/the-future-of-militias-in-afghanistan/
https://justwars.org/2012/10/10/the-future-of-militias-in-afghanistan/#respondThu, 11 Oct 2012 01:16:25 +0000http://justwars.org/?p=916Below are my remarks (click to play audio) on the future of local defense forces and militias in Afghanistan at the American Security Project on 9 OCT 2012. I essentially argue that in two years, with few choices available, Kabul will deliberately instigate civil war in remote areas of the east and south to prevent open conflict in key population centers.
]]>https://justwars.org/2012/10/10/the-future-of-militias-in-afghanistan/feed/0DavidASP Counterinsurgency PanelThe Anatomy of an Anti-Taliban Uprisinghttps://justwars.org/2012/09/12/the-anatomy-of-an-anti-taliban-uprising/
https://justwars.org/2012/09/12/the-anatomy-of-an-anti-taliban-uprising/#respondWed, 12 Sep 2012 21:15:27 +0000http://justwars.org/?p=887Foreign Policy
12 September 2012

Revolt is a loaded word, conjuring up images of the Free Syrian Army, the Anbar Awakening, and the Libyan civil war. In small pockets across eastern Afghanistan, however, farmers, shopkeepers and others are taking the fight to the Taliban over the group’s abusive tendencies. Though entirely isolated from one another, instances of violent resistance to harsh Taliban rules have spiked this past summer—brought on by school closings in Ghazni, music bans in Nuristan, beheadings in Paktia and murders in Laghman, among other causes. While a small number of Afghans admire the Taliban, most who support it do so because they are coerced, or believe that the group is less predatory than the government, though that’s hardly an endorsement. So what precisely does it take for Afghans to stand up to the Taliban, and what are their options?

When I served in eastern Afghanistan as a civilian advisor to the U.S. military, I closely monitored the Taliban’s relationship with the local population and discerned a number of red lines the Taliban could not cross, depending on the retaliatory options available to their victims. While working closely with a dozen or so of these nascent rebel groups in Laghman and Nuristan Provinces, I noted that the amount of Taliban abuse most Afghans will endure before considering rebellion in one way or another depends on a number of inter-related factors (incidentally, the calculus for whether Afghans will join the Taliban due to government abuse is similar): the severity of the grievance, the locals’ ability to retaliate, and the community’s resilience to withstand inevitable counter-attacks if they do rise up. More specifically, they ask:

Does this abuse or restriction prevent my family from earning a living or even surviving? ‘Prevent’ is the key word here. Afghans will walk an extra five miles every day to avoid a Taliban checkpoint on the way to a bazaar, and as long as they are able to get to the bazaar, the obstacle can be classified as a mere nuisance. If, however, the Taliban is restricting movement to such a degree that there is a threat of being shaken down or attacked every time Afghans leave their home, the Taliban is playing with fire.

Does it prevent the men in my family from receiving an education? Again, as long as they get the education, even if the Taliban dictates that Islam should be taught in a certain way, such slights are likely to be overlooked in the face of overwhelming force. Tactful members of the Taliban will usually encourage changes in a ‘dangerously westernizing’ curriculum through intimidation but stop short of actually closing them by force, given the value Afghans place on education and their willingness to fight for it.

Do I have the support I need (fellow fighters, weapons, fortifications) to retaliate? Afghans make decisions collectively, so if the village elders do not support a counter-attack, it will rarely happen. If an individual retaliates without consulting his elders, he risks becoming a social pariah or being thrown to the wolves when the Taliban comes hunting for payback. When the community does approve, it is usually in the form of revenge for a very specific grievance (such as a murder), targeted accordingly and proportionately to convey to the Taliban that the community does not intend to start a war but rather to secure limited retribution and make it known that a line was crossed. For instance, a specific Talib may be singled out and attacked for a crime he committed. Sometimes the Taliban will allow the retaliation to go unanswered and sometimes they won’t. If the retaliation simply entails chasing the Taliban out of an area with sticks, the insurgents are likely to let it slide and come back in a few days as though nothing had happened. Yet frequently the leader of an uprising will be beaten or executed if he is viewed as a threat, rather than simply helping his community blow off a little steam.

Do I have the support I need to retaliate continuously and maintain a heightened defense posture indefinitely? If the goal is permanent expulsion of the Taliban or if the community knows any retaliation will be met with a harsh response, they must feel confident that their supply of ammunition and fighters runs deep. Men have to quit work or school and devote all their time to defense; all movement and communication becomes riskier and more costly; intelligence networks of spotters and infiltrators have to be established and maintained; and savings are spent in days on matching the Taliban’s capabilities, including makeshift bunkers, RPGs, PKM machine guns and even DSHKA heavy machine guns. If the community lacks the resources or connections to live under siege or project power at least a mile in every direction, they will not survive permanent enmity with the Taliban.

Careful not to push the community too far, the Taliban dances a fine line as well. Abuse the population too little and they won’t fear you, but abuse them too much and you give them nothing left to lose. Inevitably, the Taliban either misread the population’s redlines or arrogantly exceed them, confident that no one would dare challenge their writ no matter how cruel they are. When faced with a possible rebellion, the Taliban will frequently roll back their demands (re-opening schools, for instance) and the population will resume its previous indulgence of modest though frustrating restrictions, such as the requirement to stay at home at night. And the dance continues.

Ultimately, it is not rare for Afghan civilians to fight the Taliban independent of the government; far harder is sustaining the battle beyond the adrenaline rush of the first few days or weeks. Once a community warns or attacks the Taliban, they become perpetual targets in repeated and intense firefights requiring ample ammunition that most civilians lack. Moreover, any area where the Taliban can exert control is remote and by definition difficult for Afghan and NATO forces to reach, so the concept of ‘back-up’ becomes laughable to these minutemen. Once locals retaliate or decide to revolt, then, where do they get help?

Extended family and friends are the first people these fighters ask for assistance. Nearly every family in eastern Afghanistan has at least one very old weapon, typically an AK-47 with maybe one magazine of ammunition—enough for a single brief encounter with the Taliban. Families and friends will loan out these weapons and offer their sons (especially if they are unemployed) to help defend rebel homes and safe houses, sure to come under Taliban fire in the coming months. Next, depending on how reliable and trustworthy local law enforcement is, these fighters will ask for ammunition, sand bags and other supplies from the District Chief of Police, who may give a token offering—despite it being illegal to do so—simply out of sympathy and guilt that he and his men lack the resources to help in any meaningful way.

Next they will ask any senior official in the provincial government who will listen, including the Chief of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Chief of Police, and the Governor himself. They may make progress here if they are well connected, but the best the rebels can hope for is that powerful provincial figures will call in favors to wealthy civilian colleagues who are in a position to offer money and men to their cause. Alternatively, rebels may get referred to Kabul or to the U.S. military, both of which work jointly on the most legitimate form of assistance any anti-Taliban fighters might secure—namely, sponsorship under the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program or some variant.

In 2010, the Afghan Ministry of Interior developed the ALP to train groups of several hundred local men to secure and defend their own communities, frequently in secluded and key locations that restrict Taliban movement (e.g., at valley mouths). They currently number about 16,000 with an additional 14,000 planned before the drawdown of NATO’s ISAF combat forces in 2014. In contrast to other Afghan police units deployed to these areas from elsewhere, these men have a greater stake in their community’s security and superior knowledge of its people and terrain. The program has been hailed by ISAF as a key ingredient to stabilizing volatile areas where traditional military and police are unable to patrol, while human rights groups have lambasted it as simply the latest installment of predatory government-sponsored militias in Afghanistan.

Regardless, Afghans and particularly members of nascent uprisings are clamoring for ALP sponsorship as the next logical step in permanently expelling the Taliban, insistent the program is the perfect mix of local initiative and distant governmental support. When I met with leaders of these rebel groups, for instance, they would frequently mention ALP before I even learned their full names. Most rebels are banking on support of some kind from their government, but many are surprised and dismayed to learn that Kabul either won’t or can’t help, despite their shared goal of defeating the Taliban and the government’s terrible track record of going it alone.

The ALP waitlist is long and subject to many months of preparation, horse-trading, ethnic rivalries and personality clashes at the provincial and national levels. Because it takes many months to get an ALP unit off the ground (even after it has been approved in Kabul), the U.S. military also relies on a number of ad hoc substitutes or precursors to the ALP, which allows ISAF to fill a security void without as much red tape. As with the ALP, the results of these programs vary considerably, with some securing the population and others exploiting it. In the last year, most U.S. efforts have been shut down by President Karzai, who sees these groups as a threat and competitor to Afghan forces. Regardless, most ‘uprisings’ fail to secure any kind of sponsorship, as neither Kabul nor ISAF have the resources or flexibility to offer anything of substance to such a large number of groups in equal need. That Special Operations Command recently suspended all ALP training for a month to better screen for infiltration threats only furthers the backlog, though for an entirely justifiable reason.

Ironically, despite the widespread resentment of the Afghan government, there is no shortage of local minutemen begging for support simply because—for many of them—the government is the only game in town. Yet there are some uprisings that are refusing Kabul’s assistance, even when it is forthcoming. At first glance, of course, any group that can fight the Taliban without government support frees up resources for other much-needed efforts, but there is a dreaded word in Afghanistan for civilian groups of fighters with well-stocked armories—militias—and they typically behave like the Taliban with a different name.

This summer’s uprising in Ghazni, for instance, has been so overwhelmed by factionalism, co-option and internal conflict that it has become a case study in the perils of encouraging the wrong rebellion.

Part 2

It remains unclear why Afghans appear more resistant to Taliban rule this summer than in the past. Perhaps the Taliban have been making even more burdensome demands than usual, increasingly aware that American and NATO forces are heading for the exits. Or perhaps Afghans are seeing the drawdown as a wake-up call that ensuring their own security is more vital than ever. Both explanations are simplistic, if only because the uprisings taking place across Afghanistan are, like nearly every other phenomenon in the country, occurring in isolation from one another, ever dependent on local actors and factors.

Still, with the Taliban as resilient as ever, it is understandable for American and Afghan officials to capitalize on the uptick in local resistance to Taliban predation. Given that there are certainly not enough resources to support all the uprisings, examining options in Kabul becomes a game of odds determined by how far into the future officials care to look. Where, for example, should they invest their precious resources: in the less capable popular revolt that is organic and loyal to the government, or the proficient uprising that aggressively fights the Taliban, despises the government and is brimming with former Taliban members and others with a history of fighting the government? It all depends on one’s perspective.

With most ISAF tours lasting nine months to a year, it’s tempting to play the short game and prioritize capability over loyalty, hoping the next brigade commander can control the fallout. Similarly, Afghan security officials, while there for the long term, are also under tremendous pressure to show results or be shown the door. And though it is difficult to discern loyalty and capability when any given uprising has so many moving parts, there are, inevitably, a number of telltale signs.

While most budding revolts beg the government and ISAF for support, many in Ghazni’s Andar District, where the most robust rebellion is taking place, claim they do not need help, particularly from the government. Daud Sultanzoi, a former member of parliament from Ghazni told RFE/RL, “Anti-Taliban movements cannot have a sponsor and be identified with this government. As soon as this government touches anything it turns into evil. The government doesn’t have the credibility to be the backbone for such uprisings. These uprisings need energy, which has to come from the people.” While certainly an insightful observation, to not have to rely on the government for resources is a luxury that actually makes their endeavor more suspicious, not less. More than 250 Ghazni rebels have reportedly engaged the Taliban in 33 firefights since late May, and even if exaggerated, the fact that they have cleared more than 50 villages representing more than 4000 people and held those areas for several months is a testament to their firepower and supplies. Not even wealthy locals in Ghazni can afford to sustain that kind of campaign. Yet their supplies are coming from somewhere.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Asadullah Khalid, currently the Minister of Border and Tribal Affairs, is helping the rebels secure ammunition “independently of the government” because his family is from Ghazni province, though not the rebelling districts. (Khalid fought alongside the Northern Alliance, he has been governor of Ghazni and Kandahar, and President Karzai recently appointed him Chief of NDS. He has also been accused of running drugs and abusing detainees in private Kandahar prisons.) Afghan officials often have a destructive tendency of wearing multiple hats (Khalid is also serving as “Chief of Security for the Southern Zone”), and it is likely that men like Khalid are plugging rebels into their respective procurement networks to facilitate this rebellion without official sanction or government funds. Khalid even brought in allied commanders from other parts of Ghazni to lead the uprising, much to locals’ chagrin. Unsurprisingly, then, the revolts have spread southward through Ghazni, closer to Khalid’s home district of Nawa more than 100 miles to the south. And this potential hijacking may run deeper still.

An additional likely sponsor (either through or in addition to Khalid) is Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), one of the lesser-known Afghan insurgent groups prevalent in the north and east with a long history of fighting Soviets and other Afghan groups. After many senior figures of HIG broke off to form an influential political party, its militant wing continues using proceeds from an extensive criminal network to attack ISAF and Afghan forces. HIG has been active in Ghazni for decades and regularly engages the Taliban in turf wars. The question, then, is whether this uprising started as an organic rebellion, remains one, or was never one to begin with. Granted, much like in the rest of eastern Afghanistan, if you have stockpiles of weapons and you are fighting the Taliban independent of the government, locals out of old habit will usually assume you are HIG, so reports of the group co-opting the rebellion may be exaggerated. Then again, there is plenty of evidence that HIG is deeply involved in this effort. Clouding matters further is the tendency among ‘rebels’, ‘militants’ and ‘criminals’ to mix roles and networks, almost to the point where many of these gunmen are loyal only to themselves, the next buck and a hint of glory.

Faizanullah Faizan—a former Hezb-e Islami commander, governor of Ghazni, and Andar native—is reportedly raising money and political support for the rebellion on behalf of his party in Kabul, as well as arranging logistics on the ground. He recently acknowledged that the rebellion’s fighters come from “all the old groups” but insisted that the effort is “100% civilian.” (The fact that Faizan was ambushed and nearly killed by three men (including a Pakistani suicide bomber) for his role in facilitating the uprising illustrates that the Taliban are not willing to concede the territory without a fight.)

Other indicators suggest the rebellion was never organic. The New York Times and Newsweek noted that much of the resistance was the result of a split within the Taliban in Ghazni, when some members turned on their brethren for their particularly brutal tendencies originating in Pakistan. This, too, is quite normal. In any given village cluster, there are local Taliban and foreign Taliban (frequently Pakistanis, or Afghans who have spent much of their lives in northwest Pakistan). The foreigners control the money flow and thus everything else, and they frequently bring a brand of Islam with them that the local Taliban cannot justify within their communities, causing tremendous friction. Yet these are hardly reformed insurgents. Al Jazeera reported that in an attempt to bribe the Taliban into opening the schools in Ghazni, locals offered to fight ISAF forces side-by-side with the insurgents, but the Taliban refused. Nor does such an offer sound like much of a sacrifice or particularly abnormal; the overall Ghazni commander, Lutfullah Kamran, is reported to have told local elders that “he would fight the Americans, but his first priority is securing his people’s future.” And once those bigger fish are fried?

With the U.S. combat mission ending in 2014 and an unknown number of residual forces remaining afterwards, rural Afghans in the east are hedging their bets by providing ‘passive’ support to the Taliban—i.e., failing to report Taliban activities for fear of retaliation. Yet for key members of the Ghazni resistance to be so willing or eager to ‘actively’ support the insurgency by attacking U.S. and Afghan forces suggests that this particular rebellion is of an altogether different nature than those sprinkled across the rest of the east. Ironically, then, the rebellions that draw the least attention are frequently the ones worth supporting the most.

ISAF Commander General John Allen recently described a more robust and legitimate government assistance being provided to uprisings in Kamdesh, Nuristan, one of the least accessible places on Earth. The Afghan National Army is “resupplying in Kamdesh using Afghan Army helicopters,” he said. “They’re getting up there. [The Afghan Army is] doing it. They’ve inserted commandos up there. They’re resupplying local elements up there. They’re maintaining the ANP [Afghan National Police] in some key checkpoints and strong points.” Unquestionably, this is the proper way of assisting an uprising and a security force under siege, not by giving a Karzai loyalist a wink and a nod to do everything quietly and with zero accountability. Sadly, as I saw with uprisings in Nuristan, the terrain makes sustained governmental support almost impossible, and inevitably the population submits to the Taliban’s will until the next time the group goes too far. The formula, however, is sound and has worked in areas with more favorable terrain, such as in neighboring Laghman, where another rebellion is underway. Mysteriously, Laghmani rebels have only received food and a small amount of ammunition from their government.

Regardless, despite a wave of optimism sweeping ISAF, these uprisings do not (nor will they ever) collectively resemble the Anbar Awakening in Iraq; these rebellions are isolated, have always been widespread and are rarely resilient enough to stave off the Taliban for long. In fact, nearly all of these summer revolts will not have staying power, and despite its resources, the revolt in Ghazni may be among them. The resistance is facing violent internal and external threats, leaders of the resistance are being targeted, and at least 8% of their 250 rebels have already been killed. Village clusters along the AfPak border have a history of defending themselves with traditional defense forces like arbakais and lashkars, but their opposition is similarly equipped with a finite number of small arms, not the arsenal that the Taliban brings to bear. With an enemy like the Taliban, rural Afghan communities will rarely be able to defend themselves indefinitely without legitimate, robust, and overt government support. True, areas like eastern Ghazni welcome whichever militant group can keep the peace and permit daily life to continue, but exploitation and widespread abuse is inevitable once the honeymoon ends. Andar also welcomed the Taliban years ago because it brought a reprieve from daily threats and bloodshed. Until it didn’t.

The ultimate trajectory of the Ghazni uprising remains unknown, but ISAF and Kabul officials are failing to allocate vital resources through legitimate channels to the less prominent and organic rebellions throughout the east. For better or worse, the Ghazni rebels have what they need for now. Kabul should not leave the others to rot.

David H. Young is a conflict resolution expert based in Washington, DC, and was a civilian advisor to the US Army in eastern Afghanistan. His website is www.justwars.org.

With the Taliban close to opening a political office in Qatar for the purpose of negotiating an end to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, it is unsurprising that the Taliban’s primary rival insurgent network, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), is now clamoring fora seat at the table as well. Yet the Taliban and HIG are quite different from each other, both in how they think and how they operate, and HIG would play a complicated but very useful role at the negotiating table with NATO and Kabul if the process gathers momentum.While HIG’s forces are fewer than they were in the 1980s when its leader and founder, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was America’s favorite anti-Soviet mujahed, HIG has attacked NATO forces for years with a robust insurgent and criminal syndicate throughout northern and eastern Afghanistan, where I served as a civilian advisor to NATO forces in Laghman and Nuristan in 2011. Among other attacks, HIG organized an enormous 2009 siege on an American base in Kamdesh, Nuristan in which 8 U.S. soldiers were killed, and they participated in a massacre of 10 international aid workers in Badakhshan Province in 2010.

In the last few months, Dr. Ghairat Baheer, son-in-law and long-time representative of Hekmatyar, has met with ISAF Commander General John Allen, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to discuss prospects for HIG’s reconciliation and a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet with NATO’s eyes focused mainly on the southern heartland, it may be tempting for the alliance to focus on negotiating solely with the Taliban, disregarding HIG. Ultimately, however, tandem negotiations with both insurgent groups are vital for several reasons.First, the most combustible element to the currently projected negotiations is the Taliban’s reluctance to sit down with the ‘puppet’ Afghan government and its insistence on dealing mainly with NATO. That Kabul is being indirectly benched for these talks might compel Karzai to scuttle the efforts if he feels they are undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government, no matter the fallout. In fact, Karzai sent one such warning shot across Washington’s bow by unilaterally announcing its own venue in Saudi Arabia for Kabul’s negotiations with the Taliban, a claim denied by the Taliban’s Quetta Shura two days later.

Karzai’s gamesmanship aside, for these negotiations to get off the ground, the Afghan president needs concrete signs (not just words) indicating that Kabul will be at the center of these negotiations. So far, no signs have been forthcoming, but there may be another way to build those signs artificially.

Unlike the Taliban, HIG is eager to talk to the Afghan government, which means any talks with HIG will put Karzai front and center, where he belongs and prefers to be. Rather than fabricate a story about Kabul talking with the Taliban directly, Karzai can play up his government’s genuine and nurtured access to HIG. Highly publicized HIG negotiations may give Karzai enough negotiating legitimacy to make up for its supposed absence in talks with the Taliban.

Second, while HIG and the Taliban cooperate as often as they clash, the two groups are currently competing for NATO concessions. As the Taliban began pursuing the possibility of talks in earnest in early 2011, HIG followed shortly thereafter by meeting with then-ISAF Commander General David Petraeus in July 2011 for exploratory talks; then, when it became clear that the Taliban would likely go one step further and take the political risk of dropping its long-standing precondition to negotiations–that foreign forces withdraw before talks begin–HIG beat the Taliban to the punch and announced its policy shift in October 2011, though to little fanfare. Four months later, the Taliban likewise officially agreed to talk without preconditions, though it is unlikely that the Taliban was influenced by HIG’s announcement. And now, with the Taliban receiving so much attention over its Qatar office, Hekmatyar has become insistent that whatever happens in Doha is sure to fail as long as it excludes the relevant parties (read: Hekmatyar). Such competition for attention is favorable for the West and can be powerfully leveraged.

Specifically, it is normal for parties in conflicts like these to renege on certain principles or grandstand for their respective constituencies during negotiations, and when either HIG or the Taliban indulge in such practices, NATO and Kabul will be in a position to play each insurgent group off of the other–extending or withholding concessions for one group to make a point to the other–and ultimately secure a better outcome and on a better timetable than if NATO/Kabul negotiated with one adversary alone.

Third, while HIG and the Taliban share similar ideologies and ambitions, the emphasis of their demands is not the same because HIG has a tremendous stake in the current Afghan government. Over the years, various HIG factions have peeled away from Hekmatyar and formed non-violent political wings that now comprise a sizeable presence in the Afghan Parliament, in Kabul’s various ministries, and in provincial offices throughout the country. The current Minister of Economy, Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, is a member of Hezb-e Islami and has facilitated several rounds of talks between the militant wing of HIG and the Afghan government. Granted, like the Taliban, Hekmatyar calls Kabul a ‘puppet,’ but tellingly, his son-in-law is on a PR blitz indirectly demonstrating HIG’s reliance on the Afghan government.

HIG, then, is making a play to be the more moderate insurgent group in negotiations, and this contrasting platform will be equally useful in a dual track model. If insurgents’ moderate demands are given more attention and credibility, they will draw more proponents and momentum. HIG’s demand to date is the withdrawal of foreign forces (a demand NATO intends to mostly fulfill anyway), whereas the Taliban will surely want much larger concessions to include changes to the Afghan government or constitution. Meanwhile, as the Taliban continues to see that HIG is able to negotiate directly with Kabul without sullying its own reputation, the Taliban is likely to follow suit in Qatar and elsewhere, as following a controversial trail is always easier than blazing it.

Again, the Quetta Shura is significantly more powerful than HIG, certainly in the heavily contested south. But parity is not required to successfully alter the negotiating calculus of the Taliban. Spoilers are never as powerful as the parties whose plans they hope to spoil. And given Hekmatyar’s selfish streak, he would have no qualms obstructing Taliban plans if he sees a myopic gain in it for himself, as he has done at the tactical level on the battlefield for years.

To be sure, there is nothing intrinsic to HIG that the Taliban envies or has a history of following; this strategy would actually create such a dynamic, where instead of competing merely for ISI funding, each faction would also vie for NATO/Kabul attention and concessions, thus precluding the Taliban from monopolizing the negotiations and allowing the West to drive a harder bargain. Granted, by this logic, bringing the third and most proficient insurgent group, the Haqqani Network, to the negotiating table would be favorable as well. Yet for various reasons (including Haqqani’s particularly strong ties to the ISI and al-Qaeda), their overtures for a political settlement have been less apparent and convincing.

True, the sincerity of HIG and the Taliban is likewise highly questionable, as there is evidence to suggest that both are hungry for free concessions and are playing for time. With that in mind, however, if negotiating a political settlement with Afghan insurgents is the U.S. policy of choice, then incorporating HIG into that framework on a near equal footing with the Taliban would serve Kabul and Washington well.

Every negotiator has a toolbox of methods and angles for success, and while having multiple adversaries with competing agendas breeds more wildcards, it also generates more room for creative maneuvering. Complex conflicts require complex solutions, and we should not shy away from them.

In the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s notoriously dovish UN Ambassador, suggested that the US offer Moscow a non-confrontational trade to stave off a nuclear exchange: we withdraw our missiles from Turkey, and the Soviets withdraw their missile components from Cuba. Upon hearing his advice, President Kennedy and every member of his secretive ExComm group (assembled to troubleshoot the crisis) scolded Stevenson for recklessly forgetting the obvious lessons of Munich, when Britain and France appeased Hitler prior to the Second World War. Only a fool, they said, would reward the aggression of tyrants like Hitler and Khrushchev with diplomacy. But then, lo and behold, under cover of absolute secrecy, President Kennedy went ahead and made nearly the exact same ‘appeasing’ trade that Stevenson recommended.[1]

It would seem, then, that if Kennedy handled the situation well—and there is a virtual consensus that he did—then appeasement is appropriate so long as no one knows about it. Ironically, the only party with whom we ever felt a need to be secretive was the USSR, and they were the only ones privy to the deal. The subterfuge, then, was apparently for the sole benefit of the American people, who would have likely seen this trade as a sign of capitulation and weakness, even if it came (as it eventually did) on the heels of a forceful blockade of Cuba. Kennedy knew that Americans were just as likely as anyone to mistake the feeling of humiliation for the presence of weakness, and proceed to throw him under the bus. But why?

With enemies ranging from empires to nation-states to terrorist organizations, the policy of appeasement has been scorned for the last 70 years to rouse the rabble out of its comfortable apathy and confront unadulterated evil. Unsurprisingly, however, our disdain in the West for any scent of appeasement has led to a widespread and knee-jerk tendency to identify and dismiss any policy of restraint or conservation, frequently at the expense of grounded foreign policy. Not only, then, is appeasement wildly over-diagnosed, but even when accurately identified, the policy is quickly discarded as a tool of the weak. And with the Obama Administration making numerous overtures of reengagement with Syria, Iran and other controversial parties, a close examination of both the legitimate and delusional perils of appeasement is long overdue. Anti-appeasement rhetoric and survival instincts run amok have clouded our judgment, and it is time to right the ship.

Appeasement 1.0

In September 1938, after Adolf Hitler annexed and occupied part of Czechoslovakia for the ostensible purpose of taming ethnic conflict, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement that allowed Hitler to keep the territory, despite a previous French security guarantee protecting Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty. In return for this concession, Hitler promised not to seize any more territory, but he soon invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland, forcing Britain and France to declare war.

By the close of the war, the appeasement lesson had been drawn quickly and fiercely, leaving behind a legacy with a seemingly eternal shelf life.[2] Barely beneath the surface of every subsequent history textbook, the parable of Munich is loud and clear: the longer we wait to stand up to a bully, the more the bully will take by force—and the weaker we will be when war inevitably ensues.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to exploring the nuances of appeasement is that the approach of the British and French toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s is widely regarded as perhaps the most catastrophic example of appeasement on record. As a result, it would have been impossible for us not to forge a nearly unbreakable association between raw appeasement and cataclysmic disaster. Nor has anyone really resisted this impulse.

Before Munich, however, the policy of appeasement was almost institutional in its prevalence and application, both in Britain and elsewhere.[3] Yet while historians in recent decades have been reconsidering just how abnormal or scandalous British and French decisions were, the popular package of appeasement today is still painted thick with cavalier weakness, much in accordance with the policy’s notable detractors.

“It is precisely when the vital interests are bartered in return for minor concessions, or none at all, that appeasement has taken place,” says Frederick Hartmann.[4] Chamberlain’s mistake, then, was his assumption that Hitler would keep his promise not to demand more territory when nothing had been asked of Hitler to begin with. “Appeasement is a corrupted policy of compromise, made erroneous by mistaking a policy of imperialism for a policy of the status quo,” according to Hans Morgenthau, the father of realpolitik.[5] Chamberlain and Daladier thought Hitler would settle for the status quo, when really it turned out that he would settle for nothing less than world domination. In other words, Morgenthau argues, the appeaser’s error is the failure to see that “successive demands are but links of a chain at the end of which stands the overthrow of the status quo.”[6]

In the case of the Second World War, Britain and France hoped to avoid war by appeasing Germany on several occasions, but both eventually recognized that war was unavoidable, given the unlimited nature of Germany’s demands. Britain and France, the thinking goes, should have known in Munich—if not earlier—that neither Hitler’s character nor his ambitions could be trusted, and that appeasement would only whet his appetite. Accordingly, Hitler should have been confronted as soon as possible to prove Europe’s resolve, to mitigate the costs of war, and to ensure victory.

Much of this surely sounds like common sense. When confronted with such a threat, the most common response is to close ranks and project as strong an image as possible. After all, weakness is not just bad for a nation’s ego. “The lesson of Munich,” writes Steve Chan, “is that appeasement discredits the defenders’ willingness to fight, and encourages the aggressor to escalate his demands.”[7] But appeasement does so much more than that.

Given the tight fit between appeasement, the Second World War and the Holocaust, it is critical to note that any defense of appeasement need not defend all appeasement—no more than defending one war requires a defense of all wars. To date, our very powerful psychological association between appeasement and Hitler’s behavior has prevented us from considering alternatives to our understandable gut feeling that appeasement will always lead to a Holocaust. Such a fallacious assumption is based not on sound public policy, but rather on the sensation that “doing something”—or anything, for that matter—is always better than “doing nothing,” which leaves us feeling impotent.

Rhetorical Baggage

The most difficult hurdle inevitably facing any advocates of negotiated settlement is the thin line between compromise and appeasement, but their vague differences do not merely point to word games. Technically speaking, Munich was a compromise; it assured Germany that it could keep its annexed territory, and it assured the British and French that they could avoid a war. Hitler had to make a concession, as did the British and French. Granted, it quickly became clear that Hitler’s promise not to claim any more territory was completely insincere, but it was still promised in a compromise. Believing Hitler’s pledge may have been a disastrous mistake, as most people believe, but the way this mistake and others like it are framed actually points to an important distinction.

At the time, before Hitler had violated the agreement, Winston Churchill—then only an outspoken figure in the British opposition—denounced Munich as appeasement. “It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced,” Churchill noted in September 1938, nine days before Munich, “but also the freedom and security of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”[8] Hitler was known for breaking promises, so in Churchill’s eyes, the futility and danger of appeasing Berlin with part of Czechoslovakia should have been patently obvious.

Yet if appeasement is simply what happens when we are fooled into trusting a liar, then Churchill (and anyone else) could only determine if Munich was appeasement after Hitler violated the agreement’s terms. Appeasement, in other words, is an entirely retrospective phenomenon, and if decried during a negotiation process, the label is simply a moral judgment and a prediction. From a historical perspective, however, to be fairly labeled ‘appeasement,’ an agreement—implicit or explicit—has to backfire; one party has to violate the agreement’s terms and make a fool out of the other party. Otherwise, we would still view the agreement as a ‘compromise’ rather than ‘appeasement’.

Even still, because the doom of Munich has been seared into virtually every political decision-making process in the West, we have come to assume that foolish appeasement can be easily diagnosed and discredited before the allegedly unreliable party even violates the agreement. Still, given Hitler’s propensity for breaking promises, we cannot imagine how anyone could fall for his tricks. But this fallacious notion demonstrates that hindsight is not only 20/20, but blindingly so. Put differently, why do we never hear about successful appeasement? Is it because appeasement never works, or because we merely call it something else entirely?

Appeasement 2.0

In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter brokered a landmark peace treaty at Camp David between Egypt (led by President Anwar Sadat) and Israel (led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin). In what was called a ‘Land for Peace’ treaty, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt—which had controlled the land before Israel captured it during the Six Day War of 1967—and in exchange, the Peninsula would be completely and verifiably demilitarized to give Israel the reassurance of a strategic buffer and retain its vital early-warning defense system.

At the time, Egypt was Israel’s most powerful and dangerous enemy—one that had (in the eyes of Israel and its Western supporters) mounted 4 strategic assaults on the Jewish nation in the previous 30 years. To put it mildly, then, the Israelis did not trust the Egyptians. Cairo had broken numerous previous agreements with Israel, including several acts of war. Between the two most recent wars, Cairo had warned Jerusalem that Egypt was preparing for war to regain the Sinai, but Israel only began listening to these warnings in the wake of the 1973 war, which naturally gave Israel reason to believe that the Egyptian military could still inflict enough pain to warrant plenty of attention, even if Cairo no longer posed a threat to Israel’s existence itself.[9]

Although many of the details (and obviously the outcome) of this treaty are quite different from those of Munich, the principal arguments remain just as potent. Both Berlin and Cairo were allowed to hold on to territory to which each claimed a strong national connection. The fact that Berlin succeeded (while Cairo failed) to secure that land by force is nearly irrelevant because the messages coming from Cairo and Berlin were the same: if you concede this territory, we will stop fighting you. Israeli, British and French leaders all traded land for the promise of peace. We merely insist that Camp David was smart (and not appeasement) because Egypt has held up its end of the bargain, while Hitler did not—despite comparable evidence at the time that made each likely to violate their respective agreements.[10]

In fact, while there is a near consensus in theory that it is unwise to reward aggressors by negotiating with (or appeasing) them, every White House and virtually every contemporary foreign policy analyst hails the Camp David Accords as a monumental success. Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said that he was wrong to have questioned and undermined Begin’s efforts at the time and wrong to vote against the ratification of the Accords in the Israeli parliament. Olmert even went so far as to say that Begin was “smarter than I was” for having made such a wise decision.[11]

Nevertheless, the Israel-Egypt treaty that followed the Camp David Accords had the same public policy implications and sent the same messages to tyrants that Munich did: first, if you are aggressive enough, rest assured that powerful countries like Israel will be forced to listen and make concessions (though probably not surrender); second, if you are able to get those concessions through a compromise, then that compromise will likely give you a tactical advantage, enabling you to easily take the modest reward for your aggression (as Egypt did), or go double-or-nothing for the jugular, as Hitler did. Aggression, according to Camp David’s lessons, will give you options, credibility and power.

Some could argue that Egypt’s power paled in comparison to Germany’s, so appeasing Egypt was not as risky as appeasing Hitler; but thousands of dead Israelis and their families certainly felt otherwise in 1978. And besides, it would be a fantasy to think that Jerusalem ever negotiates with powerless parties; Israelis only negotiate when they have to, and frequently not even then.

Nor did the US push this peace summit because Israel would be just as safe without the buffer territory. Israel’s strategic interest in keeping the Sinai was just as “vital”[12] as Chamberlain’s interest in stopping the spread of fascism, and far more vital than his interest in the actual Czech territory ceded at Munich. Likewise, trading such a vital interest for what was essentially a mere promise of peace had no bearing on Cairo’s decision to stick to the deal. For whatever reasons, Cairo did not exploit the concession and go for Israel’s jugular. Therefore, while many accused the Israeli government in the late 1970s of trading vital interests in exchange for “minor concessions, or none at all,” that paradigm has proven to be completely unfounded. In fact, Israelis have now recognized and come to value Egypt’s promise in 1978 and its legacy of peace—albeit a cold one.[13] And in retrospect, few would call Egypt’s promise of peace a “minor concession”—one that led to Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League and widespread celebrations in the Arab World when Sadat was assassinated in 1981—though Sadat’s promise was little more than what Hitler offered.

Remarkably, then, even by the loose standards of the most vehement anti-appeasers, Camp David should have backfired, just as Munich backfired. Every simplistic red flag that we have been taught to look for as a result of Munich should have prevented Camp David from ever taking place. But we somehow ignored those red flags. We let it slip through, and ironically, the Camp David Accords is likely the only blessing the Middle East has seen in the last half century.

Strangely, despite discrepancies like this one—where the behavior of leaders should be consistent but is not—we still seem to insist that it is easy to identify and reflexively dismiss the policy of appeasement; the Holocaust’s legacy is simply too powerful to deny. Yet these inconsistencies hardly mean that appeasement is always wise or always foolish; they simply show the fallacious assumptions we make about what it takes to prevent or end wars. Simply put, there are no rules to this game. After all, if people we deem equally trustworthy or untrustworthy at the time of negotiations frequently surprise us by pursuing entirely different agendas, then isn’t there something wrong with our barometer? And if only history can prove our judgments right or wrong (and those judgments frequently turn out to be very wrong indeed), then why the moral self-righteousness?

Without a doubt, some of our enemies have unlimited demands that we simply cannot and should not indulge, but sometimes—contrary to what they publicly say to us and even to their own communities—our enemies will actually settle for concessions that we could tolerate losing. In the meantime, however, the fact that we have little predictive power to discern the pathological bullies like Adolf Hitler from the hideously opportunistic and practical ones like Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has left our foreign policy a tattered patchwork of improvised disaster.

Reputational Wars

Beyond appeasement’s rhetorical and emotional barriers, however, just how dangerous is the policy itself in practice, and when? After a modest inquiry, most of the oft-cited liabilities of appeasement lack the kind of argumentative support that should always accompany such a widespread and knee-jerk assumption that dominates our policy discussions.

For instance, integral to any argument against appeasement is the assumption that appeasing—before or during a conflict—wreaks havoc on the appeaser’s reputation and (therefore) vital security interests. Hand-in-hand with any discussion of appeasement is how we want others to see us—usually as a force to be reckoned with—because that perception is said to affect our enemies’ behavior. In particular, if we demonstrate our strength with a consistent refusal to appease our enemies, then those same enemies will be less likely to misbehave or try to call our bluff. Unfortunately, by focusing almost exclusively on how others view us, we have lost our grounded sense of reality and mistaken the phantom of weakness for the real thing.

In the years since Munich, our political discourse has relied on war as a tool to bolster our reputation, and remarkably, this justification seems to be resonating more as the years go by. Such rhetoric, for instance, has played an instrumental role in the public justification and private rationalization of every US war and most of its conflicts.[14] Even before the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt was already saying that America’s readiness to fight would show (and is showing) aggressive nations that their hostile policies would not be indulged.[15]

Ever since, image maintenance has been at the center of our foreign policy discussions, and perhaps even more so since the end of the Cold War. During the Gulf War, President Bush (41) was intent on making up for Vietnam’s legacy of American weakness, while President Clinton had his own foreign policy demons to exorcise in Kosovo, after years of being excoriated for avoiding tragic wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. “If you don’t stand up to brutality and the killing of innocent civilians,” Clinton warned, “you invite them to do more,[16] but “action and resolve can stop armies and save lives.” After the NATO bombing campaign successfully expelled Serbian forces from Kosovo, Clinton noted that

I believe what we did was a good and decent thing, and I believe that it will give courage to people throughout the world, and I think it will give pause to people who might do what Mr. Milosevic has done throughout the world.[17]

President Bush (43) drove the point home even further in the traumatic wake of the 9/11 attacks, when he argued that it was his predecessor’s transient appeasement that had enabled al-Qaeda to escalate its methods and successes. In a September 2006 speech, for instance, President Bush framed America’s resolve in the context of al-Qaeda’s understanding of American weakness:

Bin Laden and his allies are absolutely convinced they can succeed in forcing America to retreat [from Iraq and Afghanistan] and causing our economic collapse. They believe our nation is weak and decadent, and lacking in patience and resolve. And they’re wrong. Osama bin Laden has written that the “defeat of… American forces in Beirut” in 1983 is proof America does not have the stomach to stay in the fight. He’s declared that “in Somalia… the United States [pulled] out, trailing disappointment, defeat, and failure behind it.” And last year, the terrorist Zawahiri declared that Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.”[18]

According to this logic, then, the only way to undermine al-Qaeda’s hope for success was to prove that it would be impossible to compel any kind of American withdrawal—militarily, politically, economically, or ideologically. Even disregarding the fact that it was al-Qaeda’s express intention to draw the US into a war, President Bush was so eager to avoid the appearance of weakness that he disregarded the implications of what it might mean to actually be weak. And it is this distinction that has haunted appeasement’s detractors for the last 60 years.

To be sure, weakness is certainly a strategic liability, but it should come as no surprise when public officials err on the side of overkill. Whether our leaders cite the threat of appeasement to garner support or because they actually believe what they say, game theory research has come to illustrate that anti-appeasement rhetoric frequently leads us to dismiss available and effective policy options.[19] Once we recognize and unpack the complexities of our understandable aversion to appeasement, only then can we harness and control that aversion—rather than be controlled by it. To that end, when we are trying to determine how our behavior will deter or encourage certain behaviors among our current and future enemies, there are a number of key factors to consider and several misconceptions to abandon.

The Stakes Game

Brand management is at the heart of public diplomacy, especially for a superpower. And as in the business world, it is important to discern the differences in the brand’s interpretation. When President Reagan withdrew American forces from Lebanon in the wake of a 1983 car bombing that killed 241 American Marines, bin Laden claims he saw that withdrawal as a weakness, and President Bush (43)—at least in retrospect—saw it as appeasement.

Yet even if one believes that the 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon was appeasement, our reflexive disdain for appeasement prevents us from asking the much-needed follow-up question: “Was the appeasement worthwhile? That is, did withdrawing do more for our reputation and national interests than staying would have?” And the answer is yes. For perspective, consider why it took so long for the US to pull out of Vietnam, while only a few substantive attacks by Hezbollah compelled a US withdrawal from Lebanon?

Simply put, victory over communism in Vietnam was considered to be a strategic necessity. For years we thought we had to win, no matter the costs. Adding more pressure, we knew the Soviets were scrutinizing American resolve for weak points, learning how we coped with losing a war that we regarded as a strategic necessity. Granted, after we finally withdrew from Vietnam, it seemed that the vaunted ‘domino theory’ of contagious communism had been discredited, but our civilian and military leadership believed otherwise at the time.

In contrast to Vietnam, however, Lebanon’s civil war was dangerous, but in the grand scheme of things, the Lebanon effort was regarded by the US as little more than a humanitarian mission gone awry in a woefully chaotic region. The same dynamic could be said for Somalia. Again, from a strategic perspective, the US mission in Somalia was not nearly important enough to continue beyond the loss of 19 soldiers, especially after such a public and gruesome spectacle like the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident televised on CNN.

In other words, only if we abandon high-stakes missions does it cause significant damage to our reputation.[20] Merely because we feel humiliated—as we did in the wake of our withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia—does not mean others will doubt our resolve when the stakes are high. After all, sizing up your enemy when that enemy is fighting a mere nuisance does not provide even moderately reliable intelligence as to how that enemy might behave if confronted by a strategic threat. Vietnam gave the Soviets a reason to doubt our resolve; Lebanon did not. By leaving Lebanon and Somalia, the message we sent was not that we had no resolve; the message we sent was merely that we had no resolve on relatively unimportant missions.[21]

Admittedly, learning that we had no resolve on these two unimportant missions was apparently sufficient to convince bin Laden that we were weak enough for his purposes, and this should certainly be taken into consideration when determining foreign policy, even the humanitarian kind. Yet solely because bin Laden used these withdrawals to convince others that the US was weak was not enough to actually make us weak. As countless investigators, analysts and journalists have revealed, bin Laden knew he could not truly weaken the US unless he lured America into a larger war that rallied the support of millions of Muslims who were traditionally indifferent to his war cries. If Lebanon and Somalia were so instructive, then bin Laden would have devoted all his resources towards duplicating those relatively small-scale incidents, forcing our piecemeal military withdrawal from Muslim lands. But he didn’t. He went big.

The mere fact that he cites those two withdrawals should point to the limited threat he knew he could pose—short of a wider war that he needed us to start. Both then and now, Al-Qaeda’s leaders are not counting on our hasty retreats; they are counting on our over-reaction. Bin Laden needed to make us feel so humiliated and vulnerable that we would forget our powerful place in the world, rashly take his bait, and continue warring with the Muslim world until our military and economy broke from the strain. In terms of policy-formulation, however, this distinction has been entirely ignored in Washington.

The Humiliation of Appeasement

Though counter-intuitive, even the painful withdrawals from important missions have a certain degree of ambiguity as to the lessons learned by our enemies. When we withdrew from Vietnam, the costs of the conflict had simply become too high to justify staying. In the end, however, the same judgment and cost/benefit rationalization that compelled us to withdraw was also employed by the Soviets, thus mitigating our reputational fallout. Similarly, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s—after nearly a decade of disastrous occupation and insurgency—we questioned their resolve to a certain degree, but we also knew from our Vietnam experience that occasionally even vital missions become too costly to continue. And it hardly meant the Soviets were weak.

Ultimately, the relevant difference here is between words and actions. If the bulk of US forces soon withdraw from Afghanistan with anything remotely resembling defeat, hostile observers in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and China will undoubtedly rub it in our faces. (We certainly rubbed it in the Soviets’ faces when they withdrew from Afghanistan.) Our enemies and geopolitical competitors will insist that our withdrawal from Afghanistan proves that we have become a pathetic, sniveling mess.

But they will not attack us as a result. In fact, they are most likely to employ aggressive tactics at a time (like now) when our military is too preoccupied to retaliate effectively, if at all. So like any country or nation with self-confidence and an investment in the status quo, we see any verbal insistence that we are weak as a sign that we are, in fact, weak—even if no one acts on those claims. To be sure, our most basic tool for gauging our weaknesses should be the prevalence of force used against us—not the extent of our enemies’ teasing. But we are human, and a sense of humiliation seldom inspires productive or even rational behavior.

Consider, for instance, that after the Israeli Air Force bombed a Syrian nuclear facility in the fall of 2007, it seemed that every analyst of Middle East affairs said that Israel had re-asserted its dominance, warned Syria and Iran, and regained the respect it lost after the Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Yet if Israel were so vulnerable and weak, then Hezbollah would have launched another war as soon as its arsenal was restocked several months after that war ended. But it didn’t, and it hasn’t.

In fact, if Israel were actually more vulnerable after the Second Lebanon War, it was only more vulnerable to teasing and gloating. As is frequently the case when any top dog gets a bloody nose, Israel felt the need to retaliate to reassure itself, not the rest of the world, of its staying power. And to that end, Israel succeeded. But humiliation is a feeling, not a state of military readiness, and accordingly, countering a sense of humiliation is a bizarre method for ensuring adequate defenses, though boosts in morale are always helpful.

Ultimately, if we cannot distinguish between taunts and threats, then we cannot distinguish between humiliation and genuine vulnerability. More than anything else, the obstacle of humiliation is emotional in nature, and our insistence that appeasement, by definition, is necessarily weakening is frequently the product of a bruised or threatened ego, nothing more. There are times, in fact, when “appeasement from strength,” as Churchill (of all people) once noted, can be “magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”[22]

Looming Threats and Limited Resources

In the early stages of the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy insisted that no one would believe we could take on communism in Berlin if we did not do so in Vietnam.[23] Yet not only were the stakes drastically different in Berlin and Vietnam—as discussed above—but going to war to preserve or bolster our image was risky given our limited resources.[24] That is, while proving to the world that we had the stomach to fight proxy wars with the Soviets, we also spent valuable resources that were needed to convince the Soviets that we could and would actually take Berlin, if and when the time came to do so. As in any war, proving that we have the stomach to do something is irrelevant if—in the process—we spend all of the resources and capital vital to actually doing that something. Fortunately, the Soviets never pushed us so far that we felt compelled to try to take Berlin. In our new wars, however, we might not be so lucky.

Appeasement 3.0

For the last six years, the US has been so consumed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that any and every threat we issue to our current and potential enemies has been a laughingstock. When the Iraq War started, Russia was preoccupied with domestic matters, North Korea was only dabbling with nuclear technology and Iran was trying to accommodate the US effort in Iraq as best it could. But as it became clear that the US would be allocating far more time, soldiers, money and attention to Iraq than Washington had anticipated, Russia, North Korea and Iran have all turned to increasingly aggressive tactics in countless public and private arenas.

After all, what reality are the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians more likely to base their policies on? That the Americans are unpredictable cowboys who must be feared? Or that these same unpredictable cowboys have spent their gunpowder, starved their horses, and earned the democratic wrath of the Cherokee, Navajo, and Apache nations?

In this way, avoiding appeasement or going to war to preserve/bolster our reputation is just as likely to backfire as appeasement is, if not more so. The war in Afghanistan was a direct challenge to the people who attacked us on 9/11 and thus was not predominantly focused on frightening our other adversaries. First we had to take out our immediate enemies, and then focus on deterring our potential ones. But after Afghanistan, we lacked the resources to simultaneously attack and invade Iraq, Iran, North Korea and (perhaps) Libya and Syria, so Washington hoped to use a successful image-maintenance invasion of only Iraq to scare the other regimes into terminating their WMD programs and cooperate fully to root out the terrorists whose activities they had traditionally overlooked.

As intended, Libya caved, but the others only mildly cooperated until they saw impending disaster in Iraq. They waited to see how serious and reckless we were—which is what we wanted them to do—but more importantly, they waited to see how competent and powerful we were. Being serious and “unpredictable”—as urged by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—is frequently helpful when confronting an enemy, but that approach loses its value if all of your unpredictable options are equally weak.[25]

And this is the danger of fighting wars in an effort to avoid appeasement. When the primary (if private) justification for going to war is sending a message, then you have to win and win big; no war at all is better than even an ambiguous victory. Yet today, not only is our military overwhelmed, but there is no way to hide this reality from our enemies, as we are operating at full capacity.

After 9/11, we had enough power, clout and flexibility for a limited war that aided American interests more than it undermined them. Had the US not intervened in Iraq, our success in the war in Afghanistan might have demonstrated US resolve without using the bulk of America’s armed forces—thus maintaining America’s reputation as a force to be reckoned with, willing and ready for deployment. But for whatever reasons, the invasion, occupation and overthrow of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was not enough—in Washington’s eyes—to solicit a sufficient degree of security- and WMD- cooperation from Pyongyang, Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli and certainly Baghdad.

Six years later, we now we have the worst of both worlds: our military is preoccupied in zero-sum nation-building when it should be preparing for increasingly credible threats in Moscow and Tehran, and exponentially more terrorists than before 9/11. Meanwhile, America’s domestic tolerance for misadventure abroad is plummeting, and there is little we can do about any of these developments. A war to bolster our reputation has been instrumental in overthrowing it, and in the process, we have revealed our immature grasp of what it means to be strong.

With simplistic ‘anything-but-appeasement’ policies, we forget that strength is more than simply appearing strong, and far more than simply feeling strong. Strength is anticipation and longevity. And while weakness and humiliation sometimes overlap—as weakness is often humiliating—usually they do not, especially not for a superpower. It does not take much to humiliate us, but it takes an awful lot to weaken us.

Unfortunately, even though President Obama seems more likely to discard his predecessor’s myopic concept of strength and anti-appeasement insecurities, the problems Obama has inherited deny him the freedom Bush possessed to set America’s agenda. So re-thinking appeasement might only be possible when we face a new set of challenges abroad that allow us to spend more time acting and less time reacting.

Either way, however, this means we must resist the temptation to grant our primordial instincts exclusive domain over the formulation of our foreign policies. Hitler’s legacy is overwhelming, much as it should be. But whether we like it or not, and regardless of what we call it, the idea of appeasement is little more than a compromise that we come to regret. And because we consistently fail to accurately predict who will stick to our deals and who will not, the corrosive compromises only become distinguishable from the successful ones after the negotiation is over. By focusing so heavily on how strong we appear to others, it is easy to forget how strong we actually are, and how easily we crack the ice beneath our feet by recoiling from appeasement.

It is time, then, to develop a more accurate method for gauging the likelihood that an enemy will abide by the tenets of any given agreement, or if war must be declared or continued. This new gauge would likely pivot on the axis of geostrategic interests, rather than on how ‘evil’ a leader or government may be. The first step, no doubt, is to recognize that appeasement is no more crippling to our national security than war is, and appeasement should be regarded in the same light—no better, no worse. Just another tool in the toolbox. We have restricted our own policy options for far too long, and only now has the cost truly become unbearable.

[2] Every US President since Munich has cited various enemies, who, presidents insist, should never be appeased—including North Korea, Vietnam, the USSR, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Iran. For a detailed analysis of Munich’s impact on US foreign policy during the last 60 years, see Joseph Siracusa’s chapter, “The Munich Analogy,” in the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (Simon and Shuster, 2002).

[3] See Paul Kennedy, “The tradition of appeasement in British foreign policy 1865-1939.” British Journal of International Studies, 2(1976), p.195-215. See also, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 16, 39, cited in Jeffrey Record, “Retiring Hitler and ‘Appeasement’ from the National Security Debate”, Parameters, Summer 2008, pp.91-101. See also Arnold Offner, “Appeasement Revisited: The United States, Great Britain, and Germany, 1933-1940.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), p.373-393. See also Paul W. Schroeder, “Munich and the British Tradition.” The Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No.1 (1976), p.223-243. See also Donald Lammers, Explaining Munich, (Hoover Institution, 1966).

[13] One 2001 poll put the portion of Israelis who support Israel’s treaty with Egypt at well above 85%. See Jerusalem Post, 7 June 2001.

[14] Social psychology research has suggested that US presidents frequently employ anti-appeasement rhetoric to sell wars to doubtful constituencies, but equally often—the research suggests—presidents and their administrations privately believe very strongly in the necessity of confronting the enemies of their time. See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell UP, 1991).

[15] In a fireside chat on December 24, 1943, President Roosevelt said that so long as our allies remained united “there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.” Cited in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p.446.

[19] As a literature review and original contributor, the best analysis of this game theory research and its implications is Daniel Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization, 58(2): 345-73.

[20] Because nearly every military mission is framed as ‘high-stakes’ to rally support for the cause, the best indicator for what actually is ‘high-stakes’ is the level of our investment in the mission—militarily, politically, and economically. Under this lens, Somalia and Lebanon pale in comparison to Vietnam.

We have seen this movie before. Invigoration is pouring out of Islamabad these days as it tries to wrap up its Swat offensive and extend the frontline deeper into Pakistan’s northwest.

Everyone says that this time Pakistan’s crackdown is different. Islamabad, Rawalpindi, the ISI and everyone else finally gets it: jihadis do not make for good neighbours. The Pakistan Army is clearing Taliban territories; militants are fleeing from their ‘entrenched’ positions to avoid the rain of artillery shells; and Rawalpindi is gearing up for the last showdown in Waziristan. Until the next one, that is.

At a time when Islamabad is insisting louder than ever that it has always been honest and sincere in its counterterrorism efforts since 9/11, other wheels are squeaking differently. Former President Musharraf told Fareed Zakaria in May that “of course” Islamabad has contact with the Taliban. “After all,” he continued, “the KGB had contacts in CIA. CIA had contacts in KGB. That is how you have ingress into each other, and that is how you can manipulate things in your favour.” Fair enough. But if today’s state of affairs is how one might describe “in your favour”, then what does a bad day look like?

The truth is that Musharraf and most of the local Islamist groups agreed to ignore each other’s consolidation of power in their respective neighbourhoods, allowing insidious ‘rogue’ elements of the ISI to cultivate and enhance their own ‘ingress’ with the Taliban. To be sure, many believe that whether these ‘rogue’ operators are officially unofficial or unofficially official, they continue informing, arming, training and trouble-shooting for the Taliban and its various jihadi brethren—ranging from self-righteous warlords to the sophisticated Jamaatud Dawa to Al Qaeda wannabes.

Granted, the government is currently putting up quite a fight in Swat, but in the meantime, the people of Sindh are terrified that droves of Taliban IDPs are on the cusp of bringing Mingora’s fate to Karachi, while Punjabis are enduring suicide bombings because the militants there typically fighting in Kashmir decided to host and train aspiring Pakistani Taliban. Once Pakistan publicly ‘turned’ on domestic extremists, the disparate militants in Pakistan found a common enemy in Islamabad and largely abandoned the struggle in Kashmir. So who can counter this newly congealed beast?

Now that the military has put its full weight behind this offensive, potentially for the long haul, it has a chance to reverse many of the gains the Taliban made when Washington was focused on Iraq and Musharraf was focused on himself. Most importantly, this can be done without the government incurring any more wrath than it already has incurred.

Gone are the days when Islamabad walked a ‘fine line’ to ensure that the Islamists were both unrestrained and distracted by external enemies. If the Lal Masjid massacre cleared up any confusion about where Islamabad’s allegiance officially lies, then the operation in Swat serves as a considerably larger clarification. Every Pakistani who is capable of supporting the Taliban has as much reason to do so today than he or she ever had or ever will. But that is not all bad news; if everyone thinks the gloves have already come off, then Islamabad need not continue wearing those gloves out of habit. Using widespread perceptions to adjust and guide strategy is vital to any successful military operation.

For a similar reason, the massive failure of Islamabad’s February appeasement of the TTP in Swat has galvanised most of the country into swallowing the horrendous civilian casualties associated with purging Swat of the Taliban. At long last, Pakistanis seem to recognise that this operation — or something very similar to it — was inevitable and necessary to ensure both the stability of all of Pakistan and the security of all Pakistanis. So, expanding the operation into the rest of NWFP and even Fata (as the army has begun doing) is the natural extension of this logic, much to Washington’s delight. But Musharraf once exhibited such determination, as well, mostly in vain.

As usual, India holds the key to Pakistan’s insecurities, for better or worse. The Pakistan Army’s troops based along the Afghan border can clear plenty of northwestern territory and plausibly insist that this is significant. But the real question is holding the territory, and artillery is no permanent substitute for trained soldiers in this regard — not in Swat and not in Waziristan.

Yet Rawalpindi simply does not have the flexibility to transfer the needed army divisions from Punjab to the northwest because the daunting million-man Indian army is still saturating Pakistan’s eastern border. No sudden resolve in Islamabad to eliminate Baitullah Mehsud can change this military reality. So what reassurance would Pakistan need before moving brigades westward? Several divisions of India’s strike forces would have to pull back from the border as well.

When Washington realises that its latest push for a demilitarised Line of Control is not going to happen any time soon, it will push harder for a temporary drawdown of forces at the international Indo-Pak border. The time frame for deployment could be short to start, perhaps six months to a year, barely enough to assist Rawalpindi’s effort in the tribal belt. But this is naturally a tough sell in Delhi, as jihadi infiltration is a major Indian concern. Admittedly, however, there is a large degree of redundancy in these Indian strike forces, and most of them are tasked with impeding Pakistani tanks, not small-scale jihadi cells. Still, US President Barack Obama would have to offer Delhi something in return for such a noticeable stand-down.

The most likely (if private) indulgence would be for President Obama to promise Delhi that his administration will never utter a single word of concern or advice about the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Undoubtedly, the stability of Pakistan and the impotence of Al Qaeda are far too important in Washington to allow the aspirations of Kashmiris to hold sway. This would be the most powerful and immediate concession that Delhi can request and the easiest for Washington to grant, once it recognises Rawalpindi’s limitations with the current deployments.

Accordingly, Delhi would be under no pressure to resume or invigorate negotiations with Pakistan about Kashmir or any other matter, even if/when Pakistan is able to contain the militants in Fata. Such a trade could be devastating for the Kashmiris, depending on how much Delhi wanted to milk the concession, but unless Washington grudgingly indulges India in this way, Pakistan will not have the flexibility to move its troops and prevent the creation of more Kashmirs in its own heartland.

Islamabad, after all, only has so much ingress to go around. The rest is up to India.

It’s no surprise that President Obama’s foreign policy challenges are unsavory, diverse and numerous, but what makes them most worrisome is the degree to which they overlap in the worst ways possible. Our allies’ concerns, our enemies’ threats and our victims’ pleas are inextricably tied to one another—if not by nature, then by the hand of political leaders and institutions across the globe. Solving one problem seems impossible without solving the rest, or at least pretending to do so. And ‘pretending’ may be what it comes to, though it’s difficult to imagine just whom we’d fool. The world seems to be knocking at every American door, imploring, cajoling or threatening us to do (or not do) something. And whenever no one’s knocking, we can’t help but wonder where everyone went.

Iraq and Afghanistan seldom wonder far from our doorstep for obvious reasons, but with Obama’s focus on renewing old alliances and engendering newer convenient ones, many others are requesting an audience. Unfortunately, it is mathematically impossible for President Obama to address each or even most of them. And inevitably, the process of prioritizing is going to get ugly.

Here are just a few of Obama’s more important foreign policy goals:
• Eradicating (or rendering impotent) al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and some modicum of democracy there.
• Withdrawing US forces from Iraq and preventing the Iranians from filling the void.
• Derailing and/or deterring Iran’s development of a nuclear (weapons) technology program.
• Spreading democracy across the globe, especially in Muslim and formerly Soviet states.
• Reaching a final settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Mitigating the heavy spillover from the drug wars in Mexico into America’s southwest.
• Limiting the social and political upheaval of a global recession.

If only these goals could be divided on a chopping block. But instead, they are all connected in an interminable run-on sentence. To defeat al Qaeda, we have to remove its support structure along the Afpak border. To do that, we have to (implicitly) convince Pakistan that it does not need an Islamist buffer in Afghanistan to ensure its own survival. To do that, we have to ensure the economic development of southern Afghanistan.

To rebuild Afghanistan, we will need supplies, and those supplies will soon be guaranteed only when transited through Russia’s backyard. To get that access, however, Russia is insisting that we abandon our plans to install anti-ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Obama seems happy to do this as long as Russia stops supplying Iran’s nuclear development. But for that concession, Russia is also demanding that we abandon our efforts to integrate Russia’s former satellite states (Ukraine and Georgia, specifically) into NATO and other western institutions.

We might be in a position to refuse this last Russian demand if only we could know for sure that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program. But to obtain that reassurance from Iran, Tehran itself is looking for carte-blanche in its consolidation of Shiite influence in Iraq, Iran’s greatest historical enemy. We might be willing to make a trade—nukes for Iraq—but the US is slated to withdraw most of its forces anyway, so we have little to offer Tehran that it won’t get by merely sitting on its hands.

Perhaps, then, the gridlock will dissipate if we manage to break off Syria from its alliance with Iran, but that requires Israel’s willingness to negotiate with Syria and other enemies—a practice which Israel’s new prime minister is apparently refusing to do until after President Obama defuses Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in one way or another.

If you are confused, join the club. No one knows where this negotiation starts or ends, who the parties really are, and what concessions they are prepared to make. So far, the only real sacrifice President Obama has asked of the American people is economic. He has not asked us to tolerate an Iranian Bomb; he has not suggested we send our sons and daughters into northwest Pakistan; and he has not indicated just how far he would go in a confrontation with Russia. After all, reset buttons might inspire a respite of amnesia, but just how far back does he expect that button will take us? To the Yeltsin days when Russia slept in every morning? Or to the Cuban missile crisis, when no one slept at all?

The one thing that is clear is that Russia, Iran and Pakistan are at the center of nearly every obstacle we face abroad, and we lack the military, financial and political resources to address more than one of them at a time, if that.

Virtually nothing about this conflict was changed with Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Nothing on the surface, nothing lurking in the shadows, nothing for the history books. Yet the fundamentals of this conflict that have existed since 1967 are somehow becoming more obvious and less accessible every day. As rhetoric bleeds into strategy, sobering arguments are polluted by perverse distortions and the only thing that makes sense is confusion. As a humble remedy, perhaps, the following conversation is a synthesis of hundreds of hours of candid discussions (and screaming matches) between Israeli and Palestinian colleagues and friends. It offers no solutions or common ground, but only pain. Until we get through the meat of this war, the bones will never heal. Here is how these enemies think and argue.

* * * * * * * * * *

Ahmed: Why do you humiliate us every day, with your checkpoints, your raids, and your occupation? Why won’t you leave us alone?

Avi: Because we believe that you would continue terrorizing us even if we give up the West Bank. If you were eager to kill Israelis long before any of us ever lived in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, how could we possibly believe that you would be satisfied by anything short of our expulsion from the region? You can talk about peace accords, but at the end of the day, which occupation do you want to end? The one in that started in 1967, or the one you say began in 1948 when the State of Israel was established?

Ahmed: Well, I’ll answer that question with another one: You always talk about how important it is for Palestinians to recognize Israel, but which Israel do you want us to recognize? The Israel with pre-1967 borders? Or an Israel that occupies the West Bank and controls our movement with nearly 500 checkpoints on any given day? Or maybe an Israel that has been “converged” behind the “security barrier” wall/fence, which would almost guarantee a permanent separation between a Palestinian homeland and our most sacred religious sites? But to answer your question honestly, yes, your suspicions are correct: it is the 1948 occupation that we want to end, just like the Jews would love to have the West Bank as well. But we know Israel is here to stay, and we can tolerate you as much as you can tolerate us. But what we cannot tolerate is your occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Avi: Look, we don’t enjoy occupying the West Bank any more than you enjoy being occupied; it puts our soldiers at risk, it’s a drain on our military and it hurts our image abroad. We continue the occupation because we want to be safe from terrorism.

Ahmed: But you are creating more resentment and terrorism with the occupation.

Avi: That’s definitely true, but we know that if we withdraw from the West Bank, the terrorism will not stop and is likely to get worse. After disengaging from Gaza nearly 4 years ago, the only thing we got in return was strengthened resistance in Gaza. And now, because of the continuous barrage of Qassam rockets, we are evacuating our homes inside of Israel itself, not just in the territories. Gaza was your test. You proved that when given the chance to function peacefully on your own, you failed miserably.

Ahmed: Of course we failed in Gaza. You still control our airspace, our coastline, our borders and our economy. You pretended to take the moral high road with your “test,” but you did it for strategic reasons and with no follow-through. And it has nothing to do with Hamas. Our economy was already dead before you made Gaza a giant outdoor prison. For years you have made Palestinians dependent on the Israeli economy so you could control us as much as possible. Even before Hamas took over Gaza, farmers were stuck at border crossings for days, watching their vegetables rot while your soldiers closed border crossings at random just to frustrate us.

Avi: So you take no responsibility for your inability to promote peace in Gaza? And what difference does it make if we evacuated Gaza for strategic reasons? You should want to prove to the world that you can function peacefully. Granted, we set the terms for the pullout, and you can only do so much with severe sanctions and closed borders, but we gave you Gaza—we gave you something—and you failed to take advantage of it.

Ahmed: You did not “give” us anything. You returned it.

Avi: Fine, we returned it. It was a public relations coup for us. We should have negotiated Gaza back to you, but we didn’t; we evacuated it, and we ruined the credibility of the moderate Palestinians. But it was still something. Why aren’t you openly furious with the Gazans who confirmed everyone’s suspicions when their first response to our evacuation was a whole-sale pillaging of every building in sight and an increase in rocket/mortar attacks against southern Israel? Don’t you want to persuade us (and the rest of the world) that you are not just another group of thugs and terrorists?

Ahmed: Why should we? Palestinians have gotten almost nothing from negotiating with Israelis, and we cannot imagine why it is we who have to prove anything to anyone. The real question is: How can you persuade us that you are serious about peace when you took those uprooted settlers from Gaza and gave them new homes in the West Bank? Is that what you call a “confidence-building measure”? No, of course not—your unilateral evacuation was a public relations stunt. Gaza is not strategically important to Israel, and Sharon knew that abandoning it could ensure an even tighter grasp of the West Bank, which is really what you wanted all along.

Avi: Look, I think it was a terrible decision to transfer any of the Gaza settlers to the West Bank, and I think the settlers should not be in the West Bank or Gaza at all. But occupying the West Bank militarily is strategically important because it protects Israel’s dense population centers. Heavily occupying East Jerusalem (and a few other parts of the West Bank) provides a crucial buffer zone protecting our vulnerable spots from terrorists. So even if we stopped being hypocritical in every way you claim we are, then, as the more powerful party, we still have to be convinced that a free and shared Jerusalem will actually be a city of peace, and that the fighting will stop. If we had any sense that you would actually stop resisting once we ended the occupation of the West Bank or even East Jerusalem, most Israelis would gladly hand it over everything except the Old City.

Ahmed: The fanatical Jews in Hebron would never consent to that.

Avi: Of course not, nor would Islamic Jihad ever disarm for any negotiated settlement. The difference between us, though, is that the Israeli government has the power to force a negotiated settlement upon Israelis. We hated uprooting Gaza’s 8000 Jewish settlers; they spit on our own soldiers and called them Nazis. But it had to be done, unilaterally or otherwise. But can Palestinian leaders and institutions exert the same legitimate, authoritative control over its own people, including the radicals?

Ahmed: If most Israelis would hand over Hebron if they thought doing so would make them safer in Israel proper, then the same is true of Palestinian resistance: in the late 1990s, Fatah cracked down on Hamas so much that only 8 Israelis were killed by Palestinians between the summers of 1997 and 2000, compared to more than a thousand during the 2nd Intifada. We were promised at Oslo that if we delivered security, you would reverse settlement growth (or at least freeze it!); but the “dovish” Ehud Barak oversaw the development of more settlements than any other Israeli prime minister. You had your deal; you were getting virtually everything you asked for, and in return, all we got back was Jericho. You got greedy and thought you could enjoy your settlements and your peace. We controlled our radicals then, and you’re still complaining that you don’t have a “credible partner for peace.” And now that may be true, but only because you humiliated those of us who had faith that you would deliver. Now everyone thinks you suckered us, including me.

Avi: Okay, you’re right on this one. We wanted to have it both ways, and it cost us both a lot. But now the 2nd Intifada has compelled us to start building trust again, and we have created so many new terrorists that we are now faced again with the same problem: even in the best case scenario, it’s not the vast majority of Palestinians that we worry about. We are worried about the one percent that will simply never give up killing Israelis until we move to Alaska or Uganda or wherever. And among a population of 3.5 million, one percent is still 35,000—all of whom could exploit a peace settlement by launching rockets and mortars from ideal strategic positions on top of the hills surrounding East Jerusalem. Currently, we have the authoritative legitimacy to neutralize our own rabid one percent, but do you? Believing you is an incredible gamble for us. As terrifying as Gaza’s Qassam rockets are to Israeli residents of Sderot, Israel’s low-density population in the Negev make those rockets far less worrisome. But within the fantasy of a negotiated settlement, imagine how easy it would be for Hamas to launch these same Qassams from the hills of Abu Dis, just east of the Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. Terrorists could kill hundreds or maybe thousands of Israelis in a single afternoon. And when they do, no matter how we respond—air strikes, invasions, doing nothing—not only would our options be severely limited by international scorn, but any and every one of those options would make our population significantly more vulnerable as a result. So even if we believed you were sincere, we have excellent reason to believe that you would lack the capacity to eliminate the militants operating on the ideological fringes of Palestinian society.

Ahmed: You don’t get it. We’ve already proven that to you, and you blew it. Whenever Palestinians feel hopeful about the peace process, the government has more than enough legitimacy to confront our extremists. And your talk of security concerns is a joke compared to ours; you’re worried about losing hundreds of Israelis in a day, and we lost more than 200 Palestinians in as many seconds at the beginning of your latest escapade in Gaza. And then you have the nerve to tell us that we shouldn’t be allowed to have a military even after a negotiated settlement.

Avi: If you want to talk about ethics, that’s fine. You are suffering far more than we are, and I wish I could make it stop. And even if you think Israelis are sadistic land-grabbers, at the end of the day we still have genuine security concerns that have nothing to do with cruelty, imperialism, or Zionism, and these concerns have to be addressed. Too often these legitimate security concerns are hijacked by Israeli fanatics who would feel lost if they had no one to hate. And we don’t do enough to distance ourselves from them, much as we feel you don’t do enough to distance yourselves from Palestinian extremists.

Ahmed: But if most Israelis are not sadistic land-grabbers, then how can you explain the settlement growth in the West Bank—a blatant violation of international law and everyone’s common sense? Why not merely occupy the West Bank with soldiers for security reasons like any victor of war? And why are there 500 checkpoints in the West Bank when everyone knows that at least half of them have no strategic significance?

Avi: The Israeli government has always supported the isolated settlements in the West Bank in order to have more bargaining chips if we start negotiating again. The same goes for the excessive checkpoints. But the settlements between the security fence and the 1967 border are very relevant to the security of Jerusalem, to the dense populations just west of the 1967 border, and to Ben Gurion airport. Again, these security concerns are not legitimate justifications for permanent occupation and settlement growth, but they are unquestionably the most accurate explanations—regardless of what any militant Jews on the fringes of our society will tell you.

Ahmed: Even if our failure to govern would make you more vulnerable, then why not put your faith in the UN or the EU to monitor and enforce whatever negotiated settlement we conceive? You would be protected by legitimate international forces present in the West Bank.

Avi: We did that in Lebanon last summer, and right now the UN is literally watching as Hezbollah re-stocks its arsenal, helpless to do anything about it. The UN even criticizes us for our reconnaissance flights over southern Lebanon to monitor what the UN fails to monitor and prevent. UN forces abandoned us in the Sinai before the 1967 war, nearly clearing a path for the Egyptian army. Likewise, until Hamas took over Gaza, the EU was “monitoring” the Rafah Crossing between Egypt and Gaza, and they were not even required to prevent known terrorists from entering Gaza; besides, the swiss-cheese Philadelphi crossing between Gaza and the Sinai reduced the EU operation the status of a charade, and rockets rained down on us all the same. That’s why we launched Cast Lead a few months ago. Nothing else worked. But Cast Lead didn’t help much either. Regardless, Jews have been burned by the international community so many times that it is nothing short of amusing when people still urge us to rely on them. Even still, we all know that, in the end, we Israelis will have to depend on others if we ever hope to find peace. We make plenty of mistakes, and at the end of the day, even when we are extremely professional and courteous occupiers, we are still occupiers. Our frustration with Palestinians is only matched by our desire to correct our mistakes. But the risk of doing so is undeniable.

Ahmed: Undeniable but not insurmountable. How long can you continue justifying future mistakes by citing ones you’ve made in the past? How do you ever hope to control of your future if you are forever bound by the mistakes of your predecessors? And what good is recognizing your mistakes if you refuse to break free from their legacies? Damage control is not a policy; it’s a reaction. It is time to start acting. It is time for a paradigm shift in Israel.

Avi: Sure thing. You first.

]]>https://justwars.org/2009/03/11/an-honest-discussion-about-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/feed/1DavidIsrael since 1967Israeli Security Barrier and Settlements in the West Bank (.pdf)Splits in Hamas and a ‘Bi-Unilateral’ Ceasefirehttps://justwars.org/2009/01/18/splits-in-hamas-and-a-bi-unilateral-ceasefire/
https://justwars.org/2009/01/18/splits-in-hamas-and-a-bi-unilateral-ceasefire/#respondMon, 19 Jan 2009 02:16:11 +0000http://justwars.org/?p=615During an email exchange with my colleague Mark Perry at Conflicts Forum, I asked him about the incessant rumors and claims by the Israeli government that the leadership of Hamas has suddenly split along the conveniently familiar lines of “moderates” and “radicals.” According to numerous reports in the Israeli press (dutifully dispersed across the globe), the Hamas leaders in Gaza have become uncharacteristically humbled by the newly-scorched earth around them. And as a result, Hamas’ leadership in Gaza have blamed their equivalents in Damascus for refusing to renew the ceasefire in December and again for refusing Israel’s ceasefire offers this past week.

As usual, Mark Perry puts rumors like these to bed with a healthy dose of logic and insider information, as he is known for his expertise on and relationships with Hamas’ leaders in Gaza and Damascus. So why, I asked, is he the only voice insisting that Hamas is battered but hardly divided? Essentially, because the Israeli government is playing us for fools, he says. (Hyperlinks added by me).

The reason people don’t believe me is because they believe what is printed in the Israeli press. That is to say, no one seems to ask Hamas, the primary source of my material, for their position. What is interesting about this is that reporters and analysts on the telephone with me talking about the differences in “the Gaza leadership” and the “Damascus leadership” of Hamas. They tell me that the Hamas leadership in Gaza represents the moderate wing of the party and that Khalid Meshaal represents the “radical” wing of the party.

If that is true, I ask, why did Israel invade Gaza — why didn’t they try to kill Meshaal and negotiate with the “moderate” wing of the party? And if that is true, why do Israelis (like Mark Regev) describe the Hamas leadership in Gaza as nihilists? The head of the political/military bureau of Hamas is Khalid Meshaal, who has been on the telephone constantly with the senior leadership in Gaza telling them to take more practical steps with Israel.

Are there divisions in the leadership of Hamas? Certainly there are. They have disagreements, it’s not the politburo of the communist party. There are differences and debates in the Democratic Party also. Does that mean there is a split?

Israeli officials would like us to believe that they really know what they’re talking about when it comes to Hamas. In fact, they don’t have a clue. And so they repeat what they did in the 1980s: they told the world that the Tunis leadership of the PLO represented the terrorist wing of the organization, while the insiders were more moderate. It was bullshit: the inside people were much more radical — as you might expect if you live under an occupation. The Tunis leadership as it turned out was moderate: and Israel made a deal with them.

Let us suppose for just one moment that Israel is right — the moderates rule in Gaza. Let’s take it as a given — even though it is not true. What do you suppose the leadership in Gaza thinks now? Does Israel think they are even more moderate? Was the late great Said Sayyam a moderate — in comparison to say, Khalid Meshaal, Mohamed Nasser, Usamah Hamdan, or Mohammad Nizzal? Do we now, as a result of Israel’s line about a split in Hamas, suppose that their own reports that the Gaza leadership had been taken over by radicals is false, and that their new report is true?

There is one truth about a lot of media reports on Hamas in Israel. The truth is that the media gets their information from Ehud Barak and Yuval Diskin. They are fools. Their intelligence services, highly respected by the US public, are dismissed by intelligence service people here [in the US]. And for good reason.

* * * * *

On a different note, it is still unclear if the ‘bi-unilateral’ ceasefire will hold, but if Jerusalem is actually right where it wants to be (having secured vapid promises from Washington to help allies in the region crack down on smuggling), then it doesn’t seem like much has changed, nor that much was even supposed to change. All the rhetoric, tactics and strategy emanating from of Jerusalem over the last three weeks seemed to point to something much more resolute than a unilateral ceasefire. It seemed obvious that Israel had had enough with all things ‘unilateral’, like the Gaza withdrawal in 2005, which Jerusalem now condemns as a terribly weak decision.

Equally bizarre, Jerusalem’s effort–detailed by Mark–to play Hamas’ leaders and their mediators off of each other seemed to demonstrate that Israel hoped to force its enemy into making painful concessions at the negotiating table, as is frequently the custom in violent conflicts. And even if Jerusalem didn’t want to “legitimize” Hamas with negotiations, Israel seemed likely to use the conflict to bind Egypt to…well, anything. Even officials in Cairo were caught off guard by Israel’s sudden indifference to securing (even the facade of) a short-term “lull” in violence. After all, if “enough” really “is enough,” why are we seeing a resignation in Jerusalem to Hamas’ “nihilism” and the status quo? To drive the point home, the head of Shin Bet has conceded that Hamas will be rearmed in just a few months.

The answer, remarkably, is that the Israeli government is playing its own population as much as the rest of us. Losing 10 Israeli soldiers just so Jerusalem could ‘make a statement’ seems a bit pointless–though, admittedly, the statement contains more than 1300 Palestinian footnotes. But why, if Israel has now re-established its deterrence, would Jerusalem feel so hopelessly impotent as to resign to the previous state of affairs, minus a few Hamas lieutenants? With this outcome, Israel is left only with the knowledge that when Hamas wants to fire rockets/mortars in the future, the militant group will expect Israel to unleash hell in response. And if Hamas attacks anyways in three months, because the blockade is still in place? What then? How will Jerusalem re-explain this latest operation, or the next one?

[Note: an abbreviated version of this commentary was published by DAWN]

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late November, Pakistan’s government in Islamabad is scrambling to show grief-stricken Indians and the world that Pakistan is actually able and eager to mount successful counterterrorist operations. In the meantime, India is still considering its military options, and the US is finding itself in the awkward position of biased mediator, but a mediator with options, nonetheless.

Indian ire in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was so unmistakable that it prompted Islamabad to sound the loudest alarm bell in its arsenal: insisting that it could only fight one war at a time, Pakistan warned Washington that a vengeful India would compel Islamabad to redeploy the 100,000 troops currently assisting the US War on Terror in northwest Pakistan to its eastern border with India, Pakistan’s greatest strategic threat. Hearing the message loud and clear, President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Rice to Delhi to calm the Indians—much as Washington had in the past—to ensure that Pakistan has the resources and flexibility to fight al Qaeda and its various supporters on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Yet from Washington’s perspective, both the political and military implications of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan—especially the kind that involves Pakistani troop movements—open many new doors to a war on terror that appears increasingly bleak.

The View from Washington

First, India is not alone in its profuse criticism of Pakistan’s failure to fight the very terrorists it bred during the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Seven long years into the war on terror, Washington remains convinced that Pakistan is still unwilling and/or unable to make good on its counterterrorism commitments on the other side of the Durand Line. It was difficult enough to compel Islamabad to deploy twenty percent of its roughly half-million-man army to the northwestern border during President Bush’s first term, and that contribution only led to a steadfast resurgence of the Afghan Taliban and the near-steroidal growth of the Pakistani Taliban.

Facing dim prospects, over the last 18 months the Americans have begun taking matters into their own hands, dispatching the much-resented predator drones to kill senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders with greater frequency, and deeper into Pakistan’s heartland, no less. With President-elect Barack Obama insisting that he will allocate more American soldiers and resources to the ‘real’ war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington’s relationship with Islamabad has nowhere to go but down, especially as the Pakistani Taliban rip the country apart. It is in this context that a redeployment of Pakistani troops frightens Washington—regardless of who occupies the White House.

But according to a flood of recent press reports, if India seems likely to attack Pakistan, then both the Pakistan Army and the militants they are supposed to destroy could find themselves facing the same grave threat in India. Various militant factions and supporters of the Taliban—all the way from South Waziristan up to the Swat Valley—would put their wars with NATO and Islamabad on hold and find their way to Kashmir or the Indian border.

The Composition of a United Pakistani Defense

In practice, no matter how likely Pakistan’s warring factions are to unite to confront an Indian attack, Islamabad’s ability to influence that union is another matter entirely. First, it is important to note that Pakistan would need all the help it could get if India invades, say, Azad Kashmir, the small Pakistan-occupied territory that is also the operational headquarters for much of the anti-Hindu resistance, including the perpetrators of the Mumbai siege, Lashkar-e-Taiba. But to make any use of these eager militias in a conventional war, Islamabad would have to arm them with far more weapons and hardware than the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI) has traditionally and quietly bestowed upon them. And given the Taliban’s animosity for the secular government in Pakistan, Islamabad would only provide these jihadists and militant nationalists with sophisticated weaponry if Pakistan were facing imminent defeat by India. Otherwise, Islamabad, Washington and Delhi all know exactly where those weapons would be aimed once the Mumbai storm blew over.

If, however, Washington or Delhi pressures Islamabad to an unprecedented degree—and it seems that only foreign invasion could do so—then the Pakistani military would be tempted to utilize the plethora of Taliban and Kashmiri militant groups as Pakistan’s front line of defense—IE, cannon fodder—for an invigorated insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir. And unsurprisingly, many such militants would jump at the opportunity. One could even envision a scenario where—given enough pressure on Islamabad—the Pakistani military would quietly inform Delhi of the positions and plans of these militants, making them easy targets for the Indian Army. And such theatrical backstabbing would hardly be new to this conflict, nor would these cadres be difficult to replace when Islamabad was out of the spotlight. President Musharraf certainly performed such a feat in the months after 9/11 when he allied with the US, though the result was more a severing of Islamabad’s official ties to militants than it was a severing of those militants’ actual abilities.

A more likely confrontation, however, would involve the two armies meeting at their mutual international border and the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, where they would stay for a period of months—perhaps exchanging artillery and air strikes until Washington negotiates a ceasefire. (This very scenario played out three months after 9/11, when a motley crew of Kashmiri militants stormed India’s Parliament.) But once at a stand-off, neither the civilian nor military establishments in Pakistan will make the first move because they know they will lose. Yet in preparation for a conventional Indo-Pak war, these militias would have little to offer at the border and would thus, if for a time, be neutralized.

Leveraging a Shuffle at the Northwestern Border

In the meantime, however, US and NATO forces in Afghanistan would be in the unfamiliar position of having neither friends nor foes on the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border. And this would present Washington with equally unfamiliar flexibility.

The US presidential transition could alter this dynamic, but under these circumstances, the most likely benefit to the US would manifest in southern Afghanistan, where the resurgent Afghan Taliban would face potentially crippled supply lines of weapons and equipment, which are currently flowing from the Pakistani Taliban and the tribal clans loyal to them in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and especially the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). If those middlemen are busy at Pakistan’s eastern border, there will be fewer available at the western border.

Another possibility is that, like their Pakistani counterparts, the Afghan Taliban might also flock to the Indian border or LoC to fight the Indians. Numerous Taliban leaders and foot soldiers are foreign-born and tied to the militant Pashtun world by marriage and lifestyle; but many are jihadists at heart and would drool at the prospect of a glorious war on numerous fronts. Though less likely, in either scenario, the Afghan Taliban would be stretched uncharacteristically thin without support from across the border, and the US/NATO/Afghan forces would be less hindered to improve security and perhaps earn a little loyalty from local Pashtun tribes in southern Afghanistan. At the very least, there would be fewer obstacles to US intelligence gathering and infiltration, which is always in desperate need of a boost.

Either way, however, a substantive contingent of the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters will probably remain in the NWFP/FATA and continue supporting the Afghan Taliban. In the end, Pashtuns are notoriously territorial, and some will not be interested in repelling the Indians from the land of their ethnic rivals in Pakistan’s eastern provinces.

In this case, Washington would be able to test Pakistan’s claim that—as limited as Islamabad’s assistance has been since 2001—the war on terror would be in a far worse state without Pakistan’s help. Willfully testing this claim has always been too risky for the US because the price of being wrong could be frightfully high, but if Islamabad refuses to keep its contingent of soldiers on Pakistan’s western border anyway, then as a silver lining, Washington might be able to test this notion and use it as a basis for strengthening or drastically altering the US-Pakistan relationship.

After all, even if every observant Western official already knows that little will change on the ground without the Pakistani soldiers, then mounds of supporting evidence for such assertions would be critical for the Obama Administration to justify greater and deeper incursions into northwestern Pakistan to eliminate al Qaeda and its support structure. Naturally, Washington will have to test these waters more before diving in, but the situation in Pakistan is likely to get much worse before it gets any better, and the water aught to feel tantalizingly welcoming in the year to come.

As usual, another significant obstacle to such a test is logistical. If and when Islamabad and Pakistan’s military leadership in Rawalpindi agree to redeploy these soldiers eastward, there will be no one to guard and reinforce US and NATO supply lines from Karachi’s port—where roughly 75% of such supplies transit—to central and southern Afghanistan. Even before the siege in Mumbai, supply lines for the US, NATO and Afghan militaries have become increasingly vulnerable to the whims of the Taliban-led insurgency, especially in the vicinity of Peshawar.

In fact, with thousands of more US troops set to deploy to Afghanistan, this vulnerability will only increase, and the 60,000 locally recruited and poorly trained soldiers in Pakistan’s Frontier Corps would be forced to fill the vacuum left by Pakistan’s Army. For a while now, American military planners have been exploring alternative and inevitably more cumbersome routes through central Asia, but without a “Peshawar Awakening” some time soon, the stage is set for a worsening of security along the treacherous border, with or without the redeployment of Pakistani troops.

Given the presidential transition in Washington, it is still unclear if the US will be able to improvise its military approach to southern Afghanistan, at least in the near term. Nevertheless, if the tensions remain high between India and Pakistan, the US might benefit in the long term from the internal solidarity in Pakistan and the decreased intensity of conflict in the tribal regions on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Obviously, a calamitous war between the two South Asian rivals is far too high a price to pay to obtain a temporary calm in western Pakistan that may or may not benefit anyone. But if escalation is the path that India chooses—despite Washington’s calls for restraint—then high-octane saber-rattling on both sides of the Indo-Pak border (especially if it lasts for many months) could actually suit Washington rather well.

No matter who is to blame for the recent escalation of violence in Gaza—no matter which side is morally righteous—it should be obvious to everyone that Hamas is now even less likely to abandon violent resistance any time soon. Even if Operation Cast Lead will make Hamas think twice about attacking Israel in the future (doubtful), Hamas will still do whatever it takes to prepare for the day when it is ready. And the 18-month blockade of Gaza—put in place by Egypt and Israel after Hamas’ localized coup—has only made Hamas more protective of its arsenal.

As a result, Jerusalem believes that the only way to protect Israelis is to secure the Philadelphi Corridor, the nine-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, beneath which lie an estimated 300 makeshift tunnels used by Hamas and entrepreneurial Palestinians to smuggle (among other things) foodstuffs, cigarettes, livestock, gasoline and (in the case of Hamas) enormous amounts of explosives, firearms, ammunition and well-trained teachers/students of militant resistance. Without these tunnels, Israel insists, Hamas would not be able to stockpile and fire rockets and mortars against Israel with impunity. And with talk of a ceasefire in the air, Jerusalem has made the permanent monitoring and destruction of these tunnels a key sticking point to ending its assault.

But what would that effort require, and would it actually make Israelis safer?

The ideas are neither new nor particularly promising, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) explored and discarded most of them throughout the years it occupied Gaza. One suggestion was to build a moat filled with seawater that would drown any smuggler who breached it, but the proposal was abandoned due to the threat of contaminating the aquifer beneath Gaza. An underground wall was also considered, but unless it is made of titanium, Hamas would need only a chisel and a little patience. Another idea was to destroy all the buildings within a kilometer of the border (houses frequently conceal entrances and exits to the tunnels), but this could smell an awful lot like ethnic cleansing, and without a heavy occupation, the houses could always be rebuilt.

Last year, the US Department of Defense allocated $23 million to train and equip Egyptian border guards to find and destroy the tunnels, but the effort has been widely described as a failure, despite the recent deployment of “a form of ground-penetrating radar,” rumored to be on loan from the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Even with the help of technology, however, the provisions of the 1979 Camp David Treaty between Israel and Egypt places a tight cap on the number of Egyptian soldiers allowed near that border with Israel, and even if that were somehow bypassed, it is unclear how much Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could help.

After all, Cairo has been struggling with its own militant Islamist problem for decades; as the ideological birthplace of al-Qaeda and home to the spiritual forbears of Hamas, Egypt has spent years turning a blind eye to Palestinian weapons smuggling to ensure that Hamas continues to see Israel as their primary enemy, rather than Cairo.

On the other hand, Mubarak has had to balance this interest with a primal fear that Gaza’s jihadi hotbed might spill over into Egypt. For this reason it has been particularly surprising these last few weeks to see Mubarak and his foreign ministry blame Hamas for the violence and subsequently refuse to allow healthy Gazans fleeing Israel’s air strikes to seek refuge in Egypt—a decision for which he has been excoriated in the Arab world. Amidst the fallout, it is still unclear if Mubarak will resume his balancing act or if he will risk dismembering the vast networks of smugglers and corrupt officials in the Sinai Peninsula.

Given Cairo’s previous failings to curb smuggling, Israel has been insistent that whatever force patrols the border should be “international” and have a clear mandate to find and destroy these tunnels, and to capture any operatives caught in the act of smuggling. But Egypt is weary of violations to its sovereignty, and deploying the force on the Gaza side of the border is a deal-breaker for Hamas.

Besides, as impractical as a moat or an underground wall may be, an international contingent of soldier-archeologists might be even worse, as any force tasked with destroying—not just “monitoring”—these tunnels will likely find themselves in Hamas’ crosshairs. And what competent military would volunteer their services for such a task?

Well, it seems the IDF would. With as much at stake as Israel claims to have, there is good reason to think Jerusalem already has something in mind for this border, though the Israelis have been coy on the matter so far. More specifically, Israel’s primary ceasefire negotiator, Amos Gilad, rejected the prospect of an international force because it would be “devoid of intelligence, devoid of an ability to penetrate those doing all of this smuggling, devoid of an operational capability.” In nearly the same breath over the weekend, Gilad also rejected the prospect of an Egyptian force because “the Egyptians are great at making efforts, but not at achieving results.”

Granted, this could be a negotiating tactic to secure as good an outcome as possible for Jerusalem, especially given that both of these statements are accurate. But precisely because they are accurate, Israel is unlikely to entrust border control to international or Egyptian forces. To that end, one idea making the rounds in hawkish Israeli circles is to make all Gazan territory within three kilometers of the Corridor a “closed military zone” and to ask Cairo to do the same on their side of the border—forcing any future tunnel to be at least six times longer than today’s average length of one kilometer.

This would require not only destroying all the buildings in a given area, but also a massive population transfer in one of the most densely populated places on earth. The southern city of Rafah alone, with a population exceeding 150,000, would fall in a zone that extended only one kilometer into the Strip.

Though extreme, from the IDF’s perspective, without widening the Corridor in this way, reoccupying only the Gaza-Egypt border—and not the entire Strip—would make the IDF contingent along the border more vulnerable to attack from Hamas and other militants. Already obsessed with Israel’s lack of “strategic depth,” Jerusalem would need to ensure that its new formation, protruding like a twig out of southern Israel, could be reinforced quickly and thus able to withstand a sustained rocket/mortar assault from both directions.

But whoever or whatever patrols the border, indulging Israel’s tunnel vision will not keep weapons out of Gaza, no matter the success of any anti-tunneling campaign. Because an end to the blockade will be integral to any ceasefire, Hamas will merely return to the days when it smuggled weapons from Egypt and even Israel itself through legitimate border crossings into Gaza. Both then and now, nearly all of Hamas’ rocket propellants and explosives are homemade from vast quantities of sugar and potassium nitrate, which can be disguised as just about anything. Likewise, with the right instruction, even the military-grade rockets (donated by Iran) that Hamas smuggles into Gaza can be broken down into smaller pieces, packaged as “humanitarian equipment,” and then reassembled on the other side.

In the end, if Hamas wants to acquire weapons, it will acquire them. And if Israel wants to stop the attacks on its country, it has to concede that in the long term, only a brutal re-occupation of all of Gaza or a negotiated final settlement could ever make it stop. Everything else is politics.

]]>https://justwars.org/2009/01/12/tunnel-vision-beneath-gaza/feed/0DavidSmuggling beneath the Gaza-Egypt Border; Photo by ReutersGaza Map - DetailedA Remarkable Goodbye in Washingtonhttps://justwars.org/2009/01/12/a-remarkable-goodbye-in-washington/
https://justwars.org/2009/01/12/a-remarkable-goodbye-in-washington/#respondMon, 12 Jan 2009 15:33:34 +0000http://justwars.org/?p=479Enduring any event in the White House Press Briefing Room is usually an excruciating experience. Today was different. Today we saw George, the real George, in his last news conference as President. The good stuff starts at about 22:30 with a question about the mistakes he has made as President.

No pundit recap of the Bush Presidency will provide the substance (the good and the bad) of this briefing, the facial expressions, tone, gestures and honesty. You just have to watch this.

Here is the transcript and some highlights compiled by the AP, neither of which do the performance justice.

Something had to be done in Gaza. Something. Anything, really. So why not a Hail Mary?

Since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, more than 8000 rockets and mortars have been fired into southern Israel from Gaza. And who could blame Jerusalem for trying to put an end to it? After all, as every single Israeli security expert reminds anyone proffering an alternative to F-16s, would any other country tolerate attacks on its civilian population with the patience and dexterity Israel has shown? What if Houston or Atlanta were being attacked like this?

Even Israel’s President and ‘elder statesman’ Shimon Peres found himself wondering, what does Hamas hope to accomplish by constantly firing rockets? “What do they expect, that we won’t respond?” And it’s a great question, but it’s also painfully simplistic. This is not merely a matter of broad principle about patience in the face of incessant attack. There’s a reason Israeli talking points this past week have focused almost exclusively on the big picture of the last seven years—because the last seven months have demonstrated a painfully inconvenient fact: whatever its demerits (and there are many), Hamas has discipline. Period.

Far more so than the PLO ever did, when Hamas pledges to reduce tensions, it does just that. One need not believe that the group’s leadership is virtuous or courageous simply to admit that their ranks follow orders. In the months that followed the June 19 “lull” (tahadiya) in fighting between Israel and Hamas, the number of rocket and mortar attacks plummeted and stayed down for nearly five months—creating the very climate that the IDF now claims to seek with Operation Cast Lead.

If Hamas had no discipline, this argument wouldn’t fly and a Hail Mary like Cast Lead might be strategically worthwhile, but the best case scenario by any metric is a long-term version of the lull that put Israelis at great danger only after Israel launched an attack on Gaza on November 4th, effectively ending Hamas’ restraint.

While the explicit goal of this latest operation is to cease all rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel, senior IDF and intelligence officials have privately signaled in a disparate chorus that this goal is unrealistic anyway, even with a ground invasion. Israelis couldn’t even prevent rocket/mortar fire when they occupied Gaza before 2005, and back then Hamas was plagued by Fatah’s rivalry and amateur rocket technology.

‘But nevermind that,’ Jerusalem insists. ‘Details will only confuse you. Would you or would you not just sit by and do nothing in response to rocket fire on your homes?’ Apparently, it’s that simple. It’s irrelevant that Israel was benefitting tremendously from the lull and the near-deafening silence (.pdf) it produced in the southern Negev desert.

Rocket fire alone was reduced from a monthly average of 179 to less than 3—with the remainder attacks being attributed (according to Israeli intelligence) to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, no less.

Yet like any country, when Israel launches a military operation, especially a controversial one, the public relations and propaganda offensives rely on any and every rhetorical ploy to garner support, even when Israeli security officials are privately saying—usually “on background”—that the southern Negev will not be completely calm until Hamas wants it to be completely calm, and the closest Israel has ever come to that was during the above lull.

Here’s another example. During previous lulls or ceasefires between Israel and Palestinian militants, it’s always remarkable to listen to Israelis decry their enemies for “exploiting” the ceasefires to dig in and prepare for the next battle, as though Israelis spend that same time on holiday, hoping for the best. In fact, in the past week, the Israeli press has reported on the abundance of self-congratulation in Jerusalem over how much intelligence had been gathered for this operation, how many stockpiles and weapons caches had been tracked (and subsequently targeted), and how much disinformation it had spread to confuse the enemy.

So it seems that when Israelis plan for the worst, it’s because they’re competent warriors who scorn the unprepared, but when Palestinians plan for the worst, it’s because they’re drooling for martyrdom. (Rest assured, some certainly are.) And it was this apparent drool that prompted Israel to terminate its obligation to the lull on November 4th by attacking Hamas’ tunnels burrowing beneath Gaza towards Israel. (It was through a cross-border tunnel like this one that Hamas captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in the summer of 2006. So understandably, it’s a soft spot.)

For perspective, it is normal for Hamas to dig such tunnels, and equally normal for Israel to destroy them, though in a lull—and for a tunnel that had not reached Israeli soil yet—the killing of six Hamas militants in the operation doesn’t quite compute. If preparing for the next big fight is considered a violation of the lull, then it is endlessly ironic that Israel’s surveillance of Hamas’ tunneling was itself just as preparatory as the tunneling itself—like an indignant student insisting his classmate was cheating, and citing as visual proof, “Because I was cheating off of him too.” Woops.

But here’s where strategy becomes dangerously indistinguishable from propaganda. Israel has every right to defend itself; it has done so superbly and honorably on many occasions. It can prevent every attempt by Hamas to develop weapons and tunnels, as it did on November 4th. It can even feign surprised outrage whenever Hamas retaliates, as any competent foreign ministry would in the days before a powerful military operation. Perhaps Barak thought he was playing the old time-in/time-out game, but one IDF official even tried to tell the NY Times that because this was a “pinpoint” operation aimed at a specific “imminent” threat, the op shouldn’t be considered a truce-breaker, and Israel remained committed to the truce. Water under the bridge, right?

But the same common sense that compelled Shimon Peres to wonder about Hamas’ expectations surely compels Israel to consider if Jerusalem’s own attacks could actually go unanswered. Naturally, that thought process is utterly absent in the foreign ministry’s outreach of outrage because their goal is to recruit as much support as possible. And to that end, the MFA seems to be playing with graphs on its website in order to paint the lull as worthless.

But more ominously, while propaganda usually serves as a tool to support a nuanced and methodical military operation, Cast Lead seems to have been launched by a simplistic caricature of Israeli self-defense itself, blossoming in the foreign ministry’s press releases. Talking points are being confused with chokepoints, and with a caricature calling the shots, it’s no wonder that what seems to pass for “strategy” is actually just a target list mixed with a little cloak and dagger.

Instead of talking about whether the smuggler’s paradise beneath the 9-mile Egypt-Gaza border could be countered without (or even with) a long-term Israeli occupation, Jerusalem is talking about the need to “retrieve the power of deterrence” and to teach Hamas a “lesson.” Yes, we heard you the first ten times. But what is your plan? What will prevent Hamas from re-arming once you deftly destroy all of its arms depots? An “international force”? A moat or underground wall along the Egypt-Gaza border? Or perhaps a giant trench-digger to excavate the tunnels. Have you thought that far ahead? A 500+ body count in Gaza and a 300% increase in attacks on southern Israel better have a silver lining.

Either way, in its public justification for the operation, by focusing so much on the last seven years (and not the lessons of the last seven months), Jerusalem indicated that raw principle was all it dared to employ in determining the appropriate strategy for Gaza. Right when Olmert and Barak needed to sift through the fine print—which demonstrated that Hamas, as evil and wicked as it is, has discipline—it longed for neat and simple principles that begged equally blunt instruments. After all, ‘something’ had to be done. Something that matched our fury, something that vindicated our failures in Lebanon, something that deterred our enemies, something that taught them a lesson, and something that didn’t make us feel suckered and alone.

These are completely understandable and justifiable feelings for Israelis to have, but the somethingness of Israel’s resolve has hijacked its strategy. And the propaganda machine is not along for the ride, but revving at the wheel of a Merkava.

Negotiating with our adversaries is a tricky business, and with President-elect Barack Obama on the way in, most observers of US foreign policy are confident that negotiating is about to become the predominant foreign policy approach — for better or worse. They are mistaken, however, if they think this approach will be a drastic change.

In fact, in the last two years, though it is sometimes difficult to discern from White House press releases, President George W. Bush has actually been relying more and more on the very tactics that most observers have come to associate with Obama. In fact, in terms of broad foreign policy strategy, when it comes to opening the channels of negotiation and dialogue, four more years of Bush could have been alarmingly similar to those of Obama’s upcoming ones.

Consider, for instance, that after six years of refusing to negotiate with “rogue” governments or liberally labelled “terrorist groups”, the Bush administration has, since 2006, negotiated a long-lasting alliance with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, many of whom are held responsible for killing thousands of American soldiers between the summer of 2003 and the fall of 2006. In addition, Washington led successful multilateral negotiations with North Korea to ensure a verifiable dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme, which produced and successfully tested a nuclear device in 2006.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Bush administration has negotiated with Iran in order to reduce Tehran’s military and financial support of the Shi’a militias in central Iraq, and Washington has expressed increasing openness to negotiating with the non-Al Qaeda elements of the Taliban.

To claim, however, that Bush has been rectifying his disastrous policies is hardly absolution. Without a doubt, Bush has spent the last half of his second term unravelling the fabric of much of his foreign policy because his previous methods were failing at every turn.

Yet, change he has.

After all, the Bush administration is well into negotiations — on one level or another — with numerous declared “enemies” of the United States, with particular emphasis on the “axis of evil”.

Obama’s policy of pro-engagement might feel visionary and new, but only because Bush has been so quiet in his engagement with these parties, unlikely to celebrate a policy that was dead last on his initial list of priorities.

In order to provide a clean roadmap for his own foreign policy, Obama essentially ignored the seemingly pro-engagement tactics in the final two years of the Bush presidency on the campaign trail. However, it is no coincidence that Obama decided to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon. For much of the last two years, Gates and Obama seemed to be virtually quoting each other’s policy speeches, especially regarding the importance of renewing US focus on Afghanistan/Pakistan in the so-called “war on terror”.

While most of us were distracted with how the presidential candidates framed their campaign objectives, Bush was busy creating the momentum for a series of negotiations that he never had the talent or political capital to finish.

If Obama, in contrast, possesses the talent and the capital to engage our adversaries effectively and with follow-through, then his best chance resides in his ability to complement, not replace, his predecessor’s recent diplomatic efforts abroad.

Reaching an appropriate balance of introducing new policy approaches and building on those of the past administration is what Obama’s transition team is supposed to ensure, but Obama’s supporters are expecting the appearance of clean breaks and fresh policies come 20 January, if only because Bush’s belated progress was inspired and stained by a failed presidency.

Obama has the benefit (and foresight) of knowing on Day 1 what his predecessor learned in Year 6, which might mean fewer political and military mistakes, especially the hubristic kind. If they do not succeed, however, he too will have to know when to change course.

There is frequently a healthy dose of wisdom that accumulates after years of defeat, and learning lessons the hard way doesn’t mean the lessons are any less valuable; it simply means they came at an exorbitant cost. Obama stands to reap the benefits of Bush’s about-face. To fully benefit from this lesson, however, Obama must acknowledge that while he was campaigning for change, change was already under way.

There are certain fundamentals to an international negotiation that simply cannot be massaged or altered, even with the political momentum fostered by America’s incoming president, Barack Obama.

In the last five years, Tehran and Washington have jockeyed for influence in Iraq and occasionally negotiated with each other to shape the country’s democratic Shia majority to their own advantage.

And while Tehran’s nuclear weapons program has inspired greater international concern, Washington has kept any talk of nukes on the sidelines for years, hoping that the US could tackle that problem once Iraq stabilized—much as it has in recent months.

But two immediate obstacles threaten American stakes in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The first is President-elect Obama’s repeated pledge to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by the summer of 2010, and the second is the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was approved by Iraq’s cabinet and parliament last week after months of acrimony in Baghdad. The SOFA timetable requires all US combat forces to be out by the end of 2011, and for Iraqi authorities to control all military bases, cities and decision-making apparatuses by this time next year.

Yet however it happens, a unilateral US withdrawal from Iraq will leave Washington with virtually nothing of substance to offer Iran in return for the verifiable termination of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

Control of Iraq is the most important card that Washington holds right now—a card, no less, that Tehran wants more than any other, and one that the US is about to give away for free. Iran has a vital interest in keeping their fellow Shias in power in Iraq and in ensuring that the US is unable to use Iraqi bases to launch attacks on Iran. Yet from Iran’s perspective, SOFA and the new administration’s pledge to be out in 16 months both provide Tehran excellent reason to sit on its hands and ample time to develop a nuclear weapon.

Granted, the US intelligence community believes that Iran terminated its nuclear weapons program in 2003, but simply taking Langley’s word seems a bit amnesiac, especially when Washington already has the leverage to solicit verified guarantees about a critical national security concern.

Once US forces pull out of Iraq, Washington will have no credible stick or carrot with which to persuade Iran to terminate its weapons program. Sanctions will fail so long as Russia is a thorn in America’s side—providing Tehran with everything it needs—and Moscow is becoming increasingly thorny these days. President-elect Obama says he wants to give far more weight to diplomacy than his predecessor did—which is a truly welcome development—but diplomacy is just a word when the US has nothing to trade. Welcoming correspondence and “interests sections” might grease the wheels (which need plenty of greasing), but at the end of the day, we want something from them, and they want something from us. There is no honor system among enemies, so President-elect Obama will be unable to leverage the withdrawal from Iraq after the US departure.

Admittedly, for a number of reasons, it is vital to US national security that American forces withdraw from Iraq, but it would prove shortsighted if that withdrawal is conducted unilaterally or even bilaterally between Washington and Baghdad. If Washington fails to trade influence in Iraq for a verifiable end to Iran’s weapons program—even if it was terminated 5 years ago—then the real meat and substance for an unprecedented rapprochement between the US and Iran will evaporate. And when it does, if evidence surfaces that Iran is still pursuing a nuclear weapon, then an American air strike will become inevitable.

There are, however, two unlikely possibilities that would preclude the bombing. First, if a renewed sectarian conflagration plunges Iraq into such misery that the SOFA and President-elect Obama’s withdrawal pledge must be reconsidered, then he will have the space and time to renegotiate the withdrawal on terms that include Iran’s nuclear transparency. (The SOFA allows either side to dissolve their obligations with one year’s notice.)

Second, there is a chance that the very deal outlined above is already in the pipeline. After all, it remains unclear exactly how the US was recently able to persuade Iran to tighten its leash on a number of Shia militias that were fueling Iraq’s civil war. This Iranian concession could have been part of a far grander trade.

Yet pursuing such talks in the year leading up to pivotal presidential elections in both countries (Iran’s will be in June) would have been inherently risky for any government hoping to reach a sustainable agreement. If this deal is under way, however, then Obama is well situated to take the reigns and give the process new life with his reconciliatory streak.

After five years of negotiating from a position of dire weakness, it might not be too late to take advantage of the gains made in Iraq by cutting a deal with Tehran when Washington is strongest and ready to withdraw from Iraq anyway.

Over the past eight months, the Serbian government and population have defied conventional wisdom in a number of interesting ways, and together these trends could point to a formula for successful nation building, pioneered by sheer accident and talented improvisation.

In 1999, NATO launched a 10-week bombing campaign in Serbia to end what the West viewed as President Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its 90% ethnic Albanian (Muslim) population. Belgrade soon capitulated to NATO’s demands, withdrew Serb forces from Kosovo and agreed to negotiate a permanent solution with the leaders of its southern province. (Most Serbs want Kosovo to become an autonomous region within Serbia, while most Kosovars have demanded full independence).

In the last nine years, as these sporadic negotiations have fallen apart, Serbs have felt increasingly bitter and humiliated by the pariah-status adorned upon them by the international community for Milosevic’s behavior. Not only were Serbs compelled to negotiate over land they felt was rightfully theirs, but they watched as their Western mediators became advocates of Kosovo’s self-determination, eventually urging and recognizing Kosovo’s declaration of independence this past February.

The initial reaction among Serbs was fairly predictable: amidst a crowd of 100,000 peaceful protesters (more than 1% of the population), several hundred “extremists” attacked and ignited a number of embassies of Kosovo-friendly governments, doting particular scorn on the Americans, Kosovo’s strongest ally. Yet for a population that feels chronically misunderstood and humiliated, Serbians seem remarkably passive these days, only eight months later.

Typically, when a hardened and resentful population feels threatened, they close ranks and lean to the right, lifting leaders to power who echo the most confrontational voices of their constituents. In fact, it was this same tendency that brought Milošević to power in 1989, when Serbs felt that Kosovar Albanians were becoming alarmingly resistant to Serbian sovereignty. In a preview of Milošević’s scapegoating tactics in Bosnia and Kosovo, he promised that never again would Muslims enslave the Serbian nation. Unfortunately, most Serbs found his hyper-nationalism comforting and reassuring.

But in May of this year—only three months after officially losing its crown jewel in Kosovo to American and European whims—the Serbian public went the other way and gave the Democratic Party (DS) and President Boris Tadić an even stronger pro-EU coalition. Remarkably, not only does Tadić avoid the kind of polarizing nationalism to which humiliated populations are so susceptible, but he even explicitly denounces any use of force to retake Kosovo.

So what made a humiliated population so humble and amenable to peace? Where did all that February anger go?

To start, the defining characteristic of the ruling coalition in Serbia today is its explicit aspirations to join the European Union. The obvious monetary benefits would do wonders for the Serbian economy, which is still hurting from the calamitous financial decisions made by President Milošević before his ouster in October 2000. But money alone is an insufficient explanation of Serbia’s humility.

Rather, at the core of the debate is Serbia’s new sense of self-worth. It usually takes many years for a nation to recover psychologically from being seen as a pariah, especially the nationalist variety. Identities frequently coalesce and even come to depend on feelings of isolation, which can give rise to a new and even more dangerous breed of nationalism—like Germany between the two World Wars.

But with the rest of the Balkans on track to join the EU and other western institutions, Serbia has been caught in a geopolitical tug of war between the West and Russia—much to Belgrade’s delight, as nothing restores a nation’s ego like playing two super-powers off of each other. And without a doubt, there was no one better suited to this task than former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica, leader of the centrist Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS).

Until May, Koštunica had spent four years dangling the Russian card in front of Washington and Brussels in order to bargain hard over Kosovo and Serbia’s long-term political and energy alliances. Leading a small but vital contingent in the ruling coalition, Koštunica had tremendous influence over Serbia’s trajectory, especially this past year.

Granted, it was and still is clear to everyone that ultimately Serbia would be better off charting its course towards the EU, but as is often the case, a nation’s pride and principles can supersede its political and economic interests. For instance, both before and after Kosovo declared independence, more than 70% of Serbs have said that if they were only permitted to enter the EU once they recognized Kosovo, then they would refuse the offer and go it alone.

Fortunately, whether Koštunica was actually indecisive or merely keeping his options open, his apparent opportunism served as a perfect transition for Serbians to become more comfortable joining the club that essentially nurtured their local separatists and bombed them in 1999. (Of the 27 countries in the EU, 22 are also in NATO). Without Koštunica’s hard bargaining over the last four years, Serbs today would likely feel that they were being dragged into the EU by President Tadić, rather than freely choosing the EU as the best of several good options. In other words, the fact that the planet’s most important clubs courted Belgrade for its allegiance endowed Serbs with a sense of self-confidence that brought them in from the cold.

Perhaps the least acknowledged factor in this transition, however, is the effectiveness of aggressive anti-Western rhetoric by all Serbian leaders, no matter their political leanings. If Koštunica was opportunistic in word and in action, then Tadić has been exceedingly bipolar—eager to convince the EU of Serbia’s credentials, while also taking every opportunity to excoriate Washington, Brussels and other European capitals for their attempts to “blackmail” Serbia into recognizing Kosovo.

And to Tadić’s credit, his performance has been Oscar-worthy. Typical of his strategic, bipolar candor, one of Tadić’s recent remarks builds like a diatribe from Rambo but ends with the patience of Mother Teresa: “If any country recognizes Kosovo and, thus, contributes to the division of my country and insults the dignity of my people and calls into question my nation’s identity…I will fight for reconciliation.”

Similarly, Tadić’s coalition has been pushing very hard and successfully for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule on whether Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence was legal. By appealing to the ICJ, Belgrade hopes that a ruling against Kosovo’s declaration will prevent other countries and institutions from recognizing Kosovo, thus forcing Kosovo’s government in Prishtina back to the negotiating table with Belgrade.

Equally important, however, is that this effort gives Serbs a healthy and confrontational outlet for voicing their continued outrage over losing a core piece of their identity. To that end, Tadić even instructed his army to keep away from the February rioting in Belgrade, wisely assessing that Serbs desperately needed to vent. And even with Koštunica’s vital role as a lubricant for EU membership, Serbs need tremendous reassurance that their leadership will never forget their betrayal by Washington and Brussels, and Tadić is fulfilling that need with his vitriol.

Nevertheless, no matter the ICJ outcome, it is hard to ignore the fact that Belgrade is being unruly in a very ‘ruly’ way—akin to civil disobedience on an international scale. In addition to the ICJ effort, Serbs are civilly protesting the incoming European peacekeeping force (EULEX) on the grounds that it is illegal and unsanctioned by the UN Security Council. Likewise, nearly every Serbian parliament member has been lambasting The Hague for not holding Albanian militants equally accountable for their role in atrocities against ethnic Serbs during the NATO war.

Thus, by playing by Western democratic norms, Serbs make it very difficult for the EU to justify making the recognition of Kosovo a condition for EU membership. After years of little or no cooperation from Koštunica, European capitals are still getting accustomed to Tadić’s talented balance of dedicated reform and constructive nationalism.

In contrast, when Koštunica was holding the coalition’s seams together, it would have been a foolish negotiating tactic for European officials to omit the Kosovo clause entirely, as Koštunica would have exploited it. But now that Koštunica is in the opposition and the entire coalition supports full integration with Europe, Belgrade is moving forward, with or without Kosovo, and Brussels is in a position to listen.

And listen they did, when only weeks after Tadić’s new coalition was formed, Serbia’s internal security services turned over Radovan Karadžić, former leader of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, to The Hague in the Netherlands on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Both implicitly and explicitly, Tadić’s move on Karadžić made a mockery of Koštunica’s claim to ignorance about the fugitive’s location. But more importantly, this move also demonstrated to the EU that Belgrade was willing, able and eager to make the sacrifices that matter most (especially to the Dutch)—namely, arresting and extraditing war crimes fugitives.

As a result, the EU has been wise to move the goal posts and merely say that the EU “hopes” (not demands) that Serbia will recognize Kosovo. With that distinction in mind, European officials have allowed the conversation to return to the two remaining Serb fugitives, Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić, rather than demand of Serbia a symbolic and humiliating gesture that serves little reconciliatory purpose.

What’s more, Belgrade is unilaterally implementing the reforms necessary for EU membership without the cheap loans from the EU that usually accompany these early stages. And beneath the cover of hard-nosed negotiations, Tadić has very quietly agreed not to hinder EULEX when it arrives in December, though it will officially protest its “illegal” mandate.

The final factor that has defanged any sustained campaign of violence in Serbia is the opposition’s utter failure to present a coherent alternative. With Vojislav Šešelj, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), at The Hague on trial for war crimes, he reminds most Serbs of their recent past, with all its isolation and precariousness.

Having consistently painted Russia as the most promising long-term ally for Serbia, Šešelj recently lost the support of his popular deputy, Tomislav Nikolić, especially after Russia recognized the independence of Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in late August. In so doing, Russia proved that its pro-Serb rhetoric about “territorial integrity” was completely insincere. Only days after Moscow abandoned Serbia, Nikolić resigned from SRS and formed a moderate alternative party that seeks EU membership—beginning with the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), which lays out the specific integration requirements.

The one constant throughout the past nine years in Serbia has been open hostility towards the West, and this has been very difficult for the US and Europe to swallow. Nevertheless, the focus must be on results, and even setting aside every political shortcoming that Belgrade must rectify to join the EU, the emotional and ideological transformation among Serbs has been unprecedented. Even with the radicals getting 30% of the parliamentary vote in May, there have been no Serbian uprisings or instances of organized violence of any kind since the initial days after Kosovo’s declaration.

To be sure, Serbian fury over Kosovo has been channeled—not reduced—in a productive and therapeutic manner by talented politicians acting in what they believe to be the best interest of their country. Koštunica served an invaluable purpose, and in a remarkably short period of time, he restored his nation’s pride in a way Tadić could only emulate. Now, however, having passed the torch wholly to Tadić, Serbs are in a position to use Western ideals and methods to protest Western policies.

In matters of foreign policy, Western governments and their officials more often than not take rhetorical refuge in assertions of vague principle. It is nearly impossible for a country, especially a superpower, to declare and implement consistent policies because there are simply too many conventions and traditions that must be honored in the name of comfort and stability. When confronted with any inconsistencies, the natural response for a democratic government is to play dodge-ball, often frantically.

When Costa Rican government officials are asked about their positions on, say, micro-lending in Kosovo, the political fallout of almost any answer would be miniscule, if only because Costa Rica does not have significant political, economic or relational capital in Kosovo. In contrast, as a superpower, the United States has its hand in an infinite number of cookie jars, and inevitably that hand will get stuck. Not only are there more jars around the world in which America inserts itself, but there are more contraptions (money, pride, ideology, tradition) in those jars that can ensnare America’s hand, often over relatively minor concerns whose symbolism seems to take the shape of public policy.

The NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the UN protectorate that followed, and the symbiotic push for Kosovo’s development and independence have left many scrambling either to bemoan or trivialize the impact that Kosovo’s status could have on the global order. Given that the intervention, protection and development of Kosovo have each defied convention in various ways, there has been no shortage of curiosity as to what message has been delivered (and to whom) by the heavy international involvement in Kosovo. But what precisely is that message? Who is supposed to hear it, and who is not? Which precedents actually pose a threat, and to whom? And finally, how might these concerns and their inherent inconsistencies translate into future foreign policy?